3 Service Challenges You Can Address with a Unified, Asset-Centric Service Solution

Guest Author: Ed Wolf, Principal Solution Consultant at ServiceMax

On behalf of ServiceMax, I recently sat down with Diabsolut, Certinia, and Salesforce for a webinar to discuss the Rolling Warehouse Solution™ (which you can listen to here if you missed it). The solution itself connects various areas of operations to consolidate and improve service management for asset-centric service organizations, which the webinar details. During the webinar, I spoke about three key service challenges that asset-centric businesses are facing today:

• A Complex Bill of Materials
• Resource Shortages
• Supply Chain Issues

This article will review and break down the service challenges listed above, highlighting how ServiceMax’s Asset 360 and Diabsolut’s Rolling Warehouse Solution™ are helping companies solve them.

Managing a Complex Bill of Materials 

Traditionally, once an asset goes into service, a service organization needs to track all the components that go into that asset. Managing a bill of materials and tracking every component related to an asset can become extremely complicated:

• Due to the volume of information that needs to be accurately tracked and managed,
• And because many times a bill of materials does not get updated when service work is performed.
  • This means that when a component fails and is replaced, the bill of materials does not reflect that information in real-time.

The impact of this out-of-date bill of materials is felt across several teams, for example:

• Call center agents won’t have the right information and may end up making incorrect decisions.
• Technicians might show up with the wrong parts because they were misinformed about how the asset is configured.
• Connected devices in the field will have out-of-date information.

All of this goes on to negatively impact the client.

Another common issue with a bill of materials involves building assets. When building an asset, an organization needs to buy pumps, motors, generators, etc. from suppliers, which come with a supplier warranty.

• If a part fails and you aren’t tracking the supplier warranty, you may have to scrap the part instead of making a supplier claim.
  • This increases warranty costs and creates revenue leakage.

How a Unified, Asset-Centric Solution Helps:

• Centralized data, including all warranty and bill of materials related information — which can be tracked, managed, and updated from anywhere.
• An asset timeline that shows everything that’s happened to the asset from cradle to grave, as well as maintenance predictions.
  • This includes contracts, warranties, extended warranties, any kind of cases that were logged against the asset, remote diagnostics that were done, service orders, and preventive maintenance.
• IoT data to prevent downtime.
• A cost-to-serve analytic that calculates the difference in costs by the customer, asset, and geography.

Combating Resource Shortages

Technicians are hard to find and hard to keep. To help address this, technicians need access to accurate information, to increase first-time fix rates and productivity. For every repeat visit a technician makes, the:

• Higher truck roll expenditure.
• Lower job completion rates.
• More technicians are needed to complete tasks on time.

How a Unified, Asset-Centric Solution Helps:

• Provide technicians with visibility into assets, contracts, warranties, return material authorizations, and depot repair — including real-time information on the go.
  • Access to complete information, wherever the technician might be, makes it easier to concentrate on the task and the client.
  • Accurate information helps increase first-time fix rates and lower mean time to repair.
• Product service campaigns that allow mass work order creation.
  • Common use cases are product recalls and product modifications such as upgrades, but they are also great for sales opportunities.
  • Intelligent work order scheduling further increases efficiency.

Avoiding Supply Chain Issues

Supply chain disruption is a big challenge and many companies are faced with parts not coming in when they should be. When faced with this problem, how can an organization get better use out of the parts they have?

Part depot management, or being able to efficiently have parts returned, refurbished, and put back into the spare inventory pool.

How a Unified, Asset-Centric Solution Helps:

• A return material authorization functionality that notifies the technician that parts should be coming back in and that they are good to issue a return material authorization right away.
• Visibility of what’s coming in and what needs to go out.
• Managing what is available while reducing costs, instead of increasing the spare part pool.

The Rolling Warehouse and Asset 360

The Rolling Warehouse™ joins together customer relationship management, revenue management, and field service management — with the asset information, entitlement management, and service analytics discussed above.

Instead of addressing various parts of a business separately, it allows for an organization to address challenges and work towards goals from a unified solution and connected information. If your service organization is looking for an easier-to-manage solution that addresses every part of your business, contact Diabsolut, or download The Rolling Warehouse™ brochure.

About the Author

Ed Wolf, Principal Solution Consultant at ServiceMax: Experienced professional with a wealth of knowledge in Service Operations, Customer Experience and Supply Chain software. Innovative motivational leader with demonstrated management skills. Highly respected by sales and sales consulting teams. Exceptional at solving critical business issues with software solutions in complex sales environments across multiple industries. Proven presentation and listening abilities. Takes great satisfaction from leading others to success.