As the COVID-19 pandemic raced across the world in February and March of this year, countries, states, and local governments responded with social distancing, cessation of business, and “shelter in place” orders, basically shutting down their economies. Many businesses and public service offices were shuttered as the human race tried to “flatten the curve” and reduce the strain on the global health care community.

As a consequence, many service providers also halted operations, found that they could not access their customers’ assets even if they stayed open, and in some cases, found that access to the assets needing maintenance was severely restricted due to operational requirements.

As national and local economies start to come out of this economic freeze, many equipment maintenance organizations will find themselves with a new problem. They will go from little or no work to do to far too much work to catch up on. There is a mountain of deferred maintenance out there, weeks—and in some cases months—of backlog on equipment that needs to be serviced.

What is your organization doing to prepare for this huge challenge? Here at ServiceMax, we are trying to help. We have come up with a few offers we believe will help service organizations manage this dilemma in the short term and give them options for how they continue to manage their service business in the long term.

Leveraging ServiceMax Communities

The ServiceMax Customer Community is a customer portal that our Field Service clients can use to work more effectively with their customers. With Customer Communities, they have the ability to communicate more closely with customers, to coordinate service scheduling at the most optimal times, prioritize which assets or locations require maintenance first, and to enable customers to perform some maintenance themselves, where practical. The Customer Community can house documentation, manuals, checklists, videos, and other tools and instructional aides to assist customers in providing maintenance on their own equipment, helping to lighten the load on the service organization and keep critical assets within regulatory compliance.

ServiceMax Partner Communities enable our customers to take advantage of pre-existing relationships with third-party vendors much more easily. They can assign, track, and receive confirmation that the work is accomplished (all date and time stamped), and they can share work instructions, process steps, checklists, maintenance manuals, and job aids. We also have an offer combined with our Mobility Platform so that they can share live video & chat in real time to assist these partners on the correct way to complete maintenance tasks.

This gives our customers the ability to utilize a “Tier 2” maintenance approach that allows skilled and experienced technicians to walk third-party contractors through the maintenance activity from the shop, or indeed, their house. The Mobility Option also allows for a much more rigorous compliance measuring capability where needed. If needed, licenses and certifications can be uploaded, tracked, and recorded to ensure that the people doing the work are competent and qualified to do it.

ServiceMax is offering these solutions as a way to help our clients manage the transition from “shelter in place” to “recovery” and get back up and running as quickly as possible.  As you know, we are all about helping you “Keep the World Running”!

To learn more about using 3rd parties, join our upcoming Innovation Series: The Do’s and Don’t of Contractor Management

 

ABOUT Joe Kenny

Avatar photoJoe Kenny is the vice president of global customer transformation & customer success at ServiceMax. His career spans over 30 years of leadership positions in Operations, Sales, Product Development, Product Marketing, and Field Service. Beginning his field service experience with the U.S. Naval Security Group Command (NSGC) as a mainframe computer technician, Joe subsequently lived and worked in Asia, the U.S., and Europe. Joe has focused on customer relationship management, using clearly defined and mutually agreed to measurements of success, and driving to continually exceed customer expectations, allowing for exponential business growth and client retention.