Enabling asset maintenance is a main focus of ServiceMax, but the value of ServiceMax extends far beyond just enabling service. The availability of asset data, and the ability to utilize that data to configure specific views for certain users, allows for valuable insights outside of the traditional equipment services sphere. Some areas where ServiceMax adds value are:

  • Revenue generation and retention
  • The ability to manage and control costs
  • Unique tools to manage workflow automation
  • Customer effort, experience, and loyalty

In this article, we will discuss the first area, revenue generation, and retention.

Service Entitlement Management

ServiceMax provides significant opportunities to gain insight into sales opportunities. Taken in total, the Asset Object and the Entitlement Engine allow for inside sales representatives (ISR) to not only see which of your installed assets is currently under warranty, but they will also track when that warranty will expire.

The visibility to a real-time dashboard of upcoming warranty expirations allows for ISR’s to proactively target customers with extended warranties, service contracts, or maintenance contracts. This in turn maintains a predictable, stable, revenue stream and ensures that your organization maximizes the revenue from the install base.

In addition, those extended warranties and service contracts are in turn monitored in real time, allowing for your ISR’s to never let a contract, and associated contract revenue, lapse. A knock-on effect of this is greatly reduced customer concessions for services required during periods where entitlements have accidentally lapsed.

Competitive Equipment and Multi-Vendor Services

ServiceMax allows for service leaders to have their field teams track all their installed base assets effortlessly. The application also allows for service leaders to target general or specific competitive equipment installed on customer locations for competitive replacement of those units or an extension of service agreements to cover competitive equipment, whichever is in your company’s best interest.

Service leaders that find that they have less than 100% account penetration for equipment can have their field teams capture the make, model, and serial number, of competitive placements, and track those competitive placements in a separate database, to create leads for ISR’s or Sales Executives to target those units for replacement.

This allows for the strategic expansion of installed assets and an increase in account penetration via targeted sales activities. If it is not possible, due to book value, level of depreciation, or other tactical issues, service leaders can create proposals to service that equipment with existing labor resources, at a competitive price, as the only increased costs would be parts provision.

Rental Equipment Management

For those service leaders that provide rental equipment, there are many capabilities of ServiceMax that assist in increasing the economic output of rental fleets – outside of traditional equipment service. Utilizing the application to track asset status (in inventory, refurbishment, awaiting maintenance, awaiting parts, rented, awaiting pick-up, etc.) while also looking at the number of rental requests for a specific asset or class of assets allows business leaders to make more informed decisions about how to manage their fleets.

What is the demand for a specific piece of equipment? Do you/should you prioritize maintenance for that unit/class of unit to “pop it to the top of the queue” for check-in/refurbishment/repair because there are customers waiting to rent it. Do you set priority on rental return pick-ups based on demand? Does your rental team have access to the entirety of the rental database, and can they offer the next class of equipment if the one requested is unavailable? Are you tracking the amount of time that specific assets are spending in refurb/repair and can you confidently inform customers when specific assets will be ready to rent?

ServiceMax has the capability to enable all these tracking and forecasting insights. Utilizing trending repair performance data, asset rental requests, and current inventory status, it can calculate a demand index, optimize the pick-up and maintenance queue, and provide an expected availability date to help asset rental companies prioritize the availability of assets in demand and lock those customers in.

Rental and Product Sales Pull Through

For those organizations that both rent equipment and sell products, tying the rental desk to the product floor for pull-through of products, consumables, parts, and any other item is a 2-way street. Customers that are purchasing items that would normally require expensive equipment to effectively use (lots of exterior house paint, PVC tubing and glue, composite shingles) can trigger the sales operatives to open an opportunity with the rental department and offer the prospective customer attractive pricing on renting equipment that would make those jobs easier – a cherry picker, trencher, or scissor lift, for instance.

Alternatively, customers who are interested in renting any of those items could be queried about the job they are intending to do, and the rental staff could open an opportunity with the sales floor to offer incentivized pricing on the material to complete those tasks.  In this way, ServiceMax provides the insight to expand the customer’s purchase from a simple rental/parts purchase to capture more of the customer’s spend, simplify their provisioning, and improve their experience.

These are only a few of the revenue-generating opportunities that ServiceMax can provide. Because our solution is 100% configurable, and the amount and type of data that your field service teams collect is only limited by your imagination, there are plenty of additional ways that ServiceMax can assist in growing and maintaining your revenue.

Next time we will look at how ServiceMax can assist in managing and controlling costs.

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.