Driving Growth and Profitability Through Service Lifecycle Management
In a recent PTC talk, we heard from Lionel Boubli, Senior Director of Customer Transformation at ServiceMax, about improving your service profitability and reducing costs. As a reminder ServiceMax is an asset-centric service management. It provides customers with the most comprehensive set of tools that enable their service stakeholders to proactively manage, maintain and service critical assets across the entire lifecycle. Knowing where assets are, in what condition, and how they are used enables organizations to reduce cost, increase revenue, improve compliance, drive customer satisfaction, reduce risk, and help meet social responsibility.
PTC acquired ServiceMax earlier this year, but the relationship goes back further than that. The two companies have been partners since 2015, supporting manufacturers of complex, highly configured products for medical devices, industrial products, aerospace, and related verticals. These manufacturers view field service as a strategic part of their businesses to maintain product performance, extend their products' lifecycles, increase customer satisfaction, drive revenue growth, and expand profitability.
In a follow-up PTC Talk, Dion Jensen, Solution Engineer at ServiceMax, continued the story by explaining how to implement ServiceMax to improve your service profitability and reduce costs. But, of course, the best way to tell such a story is through the eyes of a customer, and one such customer of ServiceMax is Schneider Electric.
How does ServiceMax perform in the real world?
Schneider has been growing rapidly with acquisitions in the last few years; it has merged more than 27 brands. They need to support and maintain a complex legacy customer base, servicing hundreds of distinct products and millions of assets across all the companies they have acquired and providing superior service across the board. They want to deliver one unified customer experience so their client will always receive the same excellent service.
Traditionally, services were targeted at fixing customer issues, with the main driver being customer satisfaction, but the team also saw services as a fantastic opportunity for growth and profitability. They wanted to move their services team from a reactive, break-fix model into a growth engine. The ServiceMax platform was branded Bridgefield Services to enable growth, efficiency, and customer satisfaction for the field service business.
Schneider Electric has created nearly 20 connectors that fully enable the replication of service contracts and work orders across the ERP platforms, including several SAP installations and an Oracle ERP.
ServiceMax is the cornerstone platform to support functionalities for their technicians, sales, and dispatcher teams. It manages the installed base, service contracts, and work order management and leverages flexible mobile functionalities. As a result, technicians have immediate access to the correct product information while out in the field. In addition, offline access has been crucial and multi-device support enables different teams who require compatibility across devices on Windows, Android, or iOS operating systems.
The digitalization of its service processes allowed Schneider Electric to eliminate 70% of paper-based processes. They also saw the desired improvements in the team's efficiency. For example, they have seen significant improvement in scheduling times against SLAs and considerably improved their technicians' skills management with the ServiceMax Work Order functionality. And their first-time fix rate is up by three points from their performance two years ago.
Regarding customer satisfaction, they have seen improvements in two different measures. First, they saw the overall customer Net Promoter Score improve by three points from their score two years ago. And beyond that, they saw an even more significant improvement for VIP customers, whose scores jumped seven points in the same period. In terms of growth, they observed an 8% increase in won opportunities year-to-date. This represents a 6% increase in additional business.
How does the digital thread drive service growth and profit?
Assets and equipment begin as an idea, a draft, a set of requirements, or a need captured and recorded in CAD. This is the birth of an asset's digital thread. The asset now has a form, a function, a process of manufacture, and all the supplies and costs associated with it. It also has a record of expected performance and output based on adequate supplies and an ideal environment. This digital thread extends through the operation with PLM systems managing its use.
During its economic life, there is an expectation for how much output (or yield) the asset will produce over time and what maintenance will be required to operate the asset. This 'digital twin' is a set of parameters created during the manufacturing process and is the basis of the business case supporting the development and sale of the asset. A better understanding of the operational output of the asset in the field can support the expectations of the engineering and manufacturing process and provide a feedback loop to refine and aid in re-engineering the product to improve its performance continually. The digital thread enables this feedback loop.
When it comes to extending the life of an asset, services steps to the fore. While in principle, the longer an asset can stay operational, the more economic benefit you will get, there is more to the equation. Feeding back operational and service data to manufacturing and engineering enables continuous improvement of the asset in the field, driving more output at lower costs. Accessing this data in a continuous digital thread, tied to the asset and the asset history, enables this continuous improvement.