Better, faster, and less expensive—the common requirements from service leaders when asked what their goals are regarding automated asset and equipment maintenance solutions. When I was managing service operations and customers would ask for better, faster and less expensive services, I would tell them that they could pick the two they were most interested in, because you can never deliver all three effectively. Well, I guess I am showing my age because technology has advanced tremendously since then and there are now systems that can and do, allow you to achieve all three.
Better quality services require an investment of time and attention; faster services tend to sacrifice quality over time to delivery; and less expensive services sacrifice both quality and speed. The biggest challenge to service leaders is balancing the need for economy with quality and speed of delivery. That is the art of service management. The art of technologists is to provide a mechanism to provide all three and to do it in a manner that is easy to use, promotes adoption, drives best practices throughout the organization.
At the end of the day, it is about driving overall customer satisfaction, internally, as well as with external customers. This means providing an integrated service solution that reduces the amount of effort required to do the work and the amount of time and attention it takes to ensure the results are correct. Reducing customer effort and improving customer experience while controlling costs and increasing employee satisfaction using leading-edge software and transformative tools is the key.
How to get there?
A cohesive, end-to-end technology solution that provides visibility and insight into your operation is needed. Customers—whether they are your paying customers or internal customers in a different department within your organization—expect their equipment to run, as promised, with as little interaction on their side as possible. That is why they have commissioned you to service it after all. To do that, you need access to a lot of information. Information about the assets in the install base, what their condition is, your warehouse stocking, forward stocking locations, van stock inventory, parts churn rate and restocking time requirements.
Access to this information is usually restricted to the supply chain professionals, but in reality, every department in a service organization needs it to provide exceptional customer service:
- Call Center – needs to know the condition of the equipment and how to effectively perform initial triage to reduce excessive truck rolls and “No Fault Found” scenarios.
- Dispatcher – needs to know what the most likely parts required for the job are and which technicians have them in their truck stock or can access them in forward stocking locations nearby.
- Technician – needs visibility into their own van stock as well as their teammates’ stock to see who has the parts they need and how to efficiently acquire them. If there is a shortage of parts, they need to know how long it will take to receive them so that they can properly set the customer’s expectations for when the asset will be back in service.
- Supply Chain – needs to monitor parts usage, churn rate, restocking levels, and reorder cycle time to minimize inventory carrying costs and increase asset uptime.
An Integrated Service Solution
Diabsolut has partnered with ServiceMax Asset 360, Salesforce Field Service, and FinancialForce to provide an integrated, end to end, equipment and asset service offering. The Rolling Warehouse includes best-in-class asset and equipment management, routing & optimization, and customer relationship management with a leading inventory and supply chain optimization application.
These solutions, combined into an end-to-end solution, resolve the better, faster, and less expensive challenge posed by customers. They provide those common requirements from service leaders regarding automated asset and equipment maintenance solutions. They provide that visibility, ease of use, and reduced employee and customer effort while helping to reduce downtime, maximize ROI, and drive significant customer satisfaction.
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