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The service supply network is designed to provide a total solution, encompassing services and materials, during the entire lifetime of a product, and also providing pre-sales and post-sales support to the customer. Using relationship management to facilitate the flow of information, services and materials during the product’s lifetime, through the support chain, is essential when dealing with the competing interests of the individual organisations that comprise the support chain.
Best practice businesses focus on only doing certain things; those that it does better than anyone else. Working in close partnership with other organisations that focus on what they do best, creates an extended enterprise capable of providing the end customer with the best result. Working as a group of collaborating companies can provide potentially significant advantages over those companies that work alone to produce a product or service.
Any successful parts logistics operation requires an effective information flow, as this provides necessary feedback and controls.
In service logistics, dealing with small quantities, rapid response times, and numerous destinations, means that accurate control and instant feedback are decisive factors in effective management.
Bringing parts back from the field is becoming more and more important as the level of recycling increases. Controlling this environment and monitoring return levels, requires sophisticated measurement and performance mechanisms.
As life cycles reduce, it will be necessary to couple new-product-entry with old-product-exit, right across the business, to ensure minimum obsolescence of the old product, and optimum take-up of the new. The main focus of relationship management is customer retention, and managing the customer through product transition is most important if high levels of customer retention and ultimately, customer advocacy, are to be achieved.
The introduction of legislation to deal with waste management (Waste from Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) in Europe and Green Procurement Regulations and Disposal of Hazardous Material in the USA is going to have a huge impact on businesses although many business have not grasped the full impact of product disposal over the lifetime of the product and are not aware of the magnitude of risk and financial exposure that they face dealing with environmental issues over the next three years and beyond.
The service industry has been renowned as an area of under-investment in support technology, partly because, until very recently, most service organisations were treated by the Account Departments as cost centres, proving hard to justify investment.
Engineer scheduling and appointment booking have become essential aspects of a productive field force. Effective visits per day, measured as first time fixes, are a key measure of engineer productivity.
As the cost of parts has risen and the pressure on response times has increased, so effective planning and forecasting of parts has become extremely important in providing cost-effective service with minimum inventory levels.
Two-way communication in the service industry is now paramount, and sending engineers on visits and distributing parts is only one half of the job; receiving feedback and closing the loop is decisive in gaining accurate information. Mobile and wireless communications are becoming the lynchpin of successful service operations and as such need proper investment and understanding.
Ensuring that the customer is effectively dealt with, no matter what avenue of approach they address the company, is essential to achieving customer satisfaction; but contact centres do represent the best mechanism for dealing with customers. The technology now available has significantly enhanced the capability of this function.
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