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Field Service & CustomerServer

Increasing After-Market Sales

Solution

VISIBILITY Engineering, Field Service & CustomerServer®

Solution Benefits

Often the solution is greater than the sum of the parts! In this case, by leveraging the native functionality within each of VISIBILITY

• Engineering

• Field Service

• CustomerServer

The Customer gained immediate benefit including:

• Integrated Warranty Management

• Immediate Customer self-service for inquiry and order placement

• Reduction in both sales and after-market service costs

• Increased Customer satisfaction and higher after-market revenue

Customer Background

Engineered product manufacturers pride themselves on their competency in designing unique equipment as well as fabricating major components and assemblies.

A capital equipment manufacturer in the mid-western United States with annual revenues of $100M, running VISIBILITY ERP, is also responsible for after-market parts and service. These systems contain unique fabrications and electronic controls, along with commercial motors, bearings, filters, and the like. After-market spare parts sales represent 20% of revenue and 35% of profit for this operation.

Key Challenges

• High cost of equipment downtime

• Deep bills of material

• Complex engineering design changes

• Extended product life cycle

• A mixture of paper and electronic documentation

Detailed Challenges

Downtime for a key piece of equipment impacts an entire manufacturing process flow at the installation site and cost can be measured in thousands of dollars per hour. Field technicians responsible for equipment maintenance are a mixture of owner company employees, 3rd-party contract servicemen and factory service engineers.

Because of the one-of-a-kind equipment configuration, researching service part specification and availability required time-consuming retrieval of original build documents by in-house sales administration personnel. Site repair personnel often turned to local fabrication and supply houses for a ‘good enough’ replacement.

The client’s previous MRP system consisted of a small, standard-cost MRP system. Without improvements on the product configuration, capture and accomplishment of rapid retrieval times, customer satisfaction and purchasing loyalty would be lost.

Solution Details

As-built configurations are saved in the integrated database – As built bills of material are retained for multi-level hierarchies in projects and jobs. Additional service configurations are flexibly populated with key spares and serialized items. Structure and component information can be quickly retrieved via screen inquiries or reports.

Identification of service related parts allow accurate stock level planning – Service part master data fields allow quick identification of service parts and their history, planning parameters, and usage. Creation of special spares or repair bills of material allow convenient delivery and marketing of strategic material. Classic material planning techniques such as Master Production, Scheduling, Forecasting, and reorder point are also supported.

Warranty management saves $$$ – Original equipment manufacturers and suppliers warranties are captured as well as labor and material warranties for in-house items. Used along with system shipment information, this allows effective administration of pass through costs during subsequent repair activities.

CustomerServer® provides self-service access for product structure navigation, repair parts identification, parts availability and on-line ordering – This client has organized their on-line repair parts catalog into product and functional categories for fast, easy navigation to the needed component. Graphic part specifications clearly highlight the ‘correctness’ of the found item. Real-time display of component availability encourages immediate purchase while at the site. Purchase is facilitated by use of the credit card processing capability.

Tight integration throughout the enterprise – The VISIBILITY ERP system integrates all business functions throughout the enterprise.