Service Management

Increased service parts inventory, difficulties coordinating service parts and technicians, and unsynchronized data all complicate reverse logistics and service parts networks. Viewlocity’s Service Management solution organizes information so planning, executing, monitoring, and measuring your service process is simple and effective.

Challenges

• Inventory Fragmentation  – High levels of parts inventory are carried throughout the supply chain to ensure customer service levels. Additionally, parts are moving in the supply chain, on hand at the customer, waiting for disposition, and returned to the supplier for testing. All pose challenges to organizations trying to minimize inventory levels within their supply chain.

• Excessive Handling Charges – Customer satisfaction is a key deliverable for service orders. To maintain service levels, companies continue to express parts to customers. In doing so, companies may ship the same part multiple times, ship the incorrect part, or miss delivery on critical service operations. In today’s market, companies are functioning in an opaque environment where they struggle linking customer satisfaction and transportation costs.

• Process Black Holes – Distributed processes have given a rise to fragmentation of service order statuses. Customers have an expectation that service orders will be fulfilled when requested, and notified when there might be a delay. It challenges organizations to have a keen eye on all processes within the service realm including those that are outsourced.

• Product Lifecycle Management – Service parts go out, but do the service parts ever get returned and assigned the appropriate dispositions? Organizations struggle with ensuring customers return the correct part when new ones go out. They are challenged with making sure the part gets the appropriate disposition so it can get repaired or wasted.

• Fault Diagnosis – Getting the right part to the customer the first time is important to controlling cost and ensuring customer satisfaction. It begins with customer service representatives diagnosing the problems correctly. Companies wrestle with capturing real-time diagnosis and fusing that information into product diagnostic trends which can enrich their representatives’ ability to dispatch the appropriate parts.

The Solution Features

• Order Lifecycle Management – Customer service representatives can track the status of the service order from its inception until closure. It provides a powerful graphical process modeler to build, monitor, and manage a complex fulfillment process that involves multiple partner organizations. The customer service representative is alerted to events that can cause potential disruptions to the service request.

• Part Lifecycle Management – Inventory managers can track the part through the returns process, its disposition, and re-introduction into the supply chain. Parts can be tracked by their serial number or lot numbers and the inventory manager can specify rules to ensure that the same part does not get re-introduced into the supply chain multiple times.

• Extended Inventory Visibility – Users have visibility to part inventory in different nodes of the supply chain, including any inventory that may be in-transit or stocked with technicians. The user is alerted based on inventory positions such as low stock or excess stock.

• Inventory Sourcing – Users have the ability to source the required parts dynamically from the supply chain in a manner that meets its service level agreements while minimizing its total delivery cost.

• Reverse Logistics – Generates and manages Return Material Authorization (RMA) Tracking Numbers based on the receipt of an individual return. The generation of the RMA will facilitate tracking individual returns through the returns process. The system will provide the ability to monitor and track RMA goods progress throughout the returns lifecycle by capturing and displaying action-based and date-based activities and milestone details associated to returns activity.

• Repair Operations – Repair Operations can be automatically allocated to dedicated repair processes, finitely capacity scheduled and tracked across multiple domains such as suppliers, repair depots, pick-up and delivery.

• Field Service Operations – Coordinates service operations across a distributed network of service managers, inventory managers, dispatchers and technicians

• Partner Score Carding – Performance Management provides the capability to score card the performance of service representatives, diagnostic tools and partner organizations based on their service level contracts. It alerts the business unit when the performance is falling below prescribed levels or there is a risk of defaulting on service levels.

Viewlocity Solution Benefits

• Improve Customer Service – Companies using Viewlocity’s Service Management solution have seen an overall increase in their customer service levels without having to incur excessive inventory and expediting costs. Our solution enables this by providing the service organization the capability to track the customer request through its lifecycle across different organizations and contracted providers. Any problems can be quickly identified and proactively resolved reducing unpleasant customer surprises.

• Reduce Inventory Safety Stock – Companies using Viewlocity’s Service Management solution have seen an overall reduction in inventory costs. Our solution tackles this problem by providing an integrated look at inventory positions across the different nodes in the supply chain and service parts demand. It allows the service organization to optimally source the parts demand while minimizing the total delivery costs. It also provides visibility into parts returned for repair and tracks the lifecycle of the part until its disposition is completed.

• Reduce Expedited Service Costs – Companies using Viewlocity’s Service Management solution have seen an overall reduction in their reverse logistics and service freight costs. We enable this by providing visibility to inventory in the extended supply chain and the ability to track the status of service requests across the different trading partners. Our solution enables the service organization to coordinate the scheduling of service personnel and parts delivery to the customer and respond to any problems in a timely manner.

• Improve Service Representative Productivity – Companies using Viewlocity’s Service Management see an increase in the productivity of their field service organization. This is, in part, due to the fact that all the information that is required to support the service process is readily available in a single system. Further, the system provides proactive notifications of disruptions or opportunities and recommends potential options to respond to the event.