Product category:
Industrial consultancy services
News Release from: Tesseract | Subject: Machine tool supplier service centre
Edited by the Manufacturingtalk Editorial
Team on 16 March 2006
Service centre offers field service
engineers
Machine tool and engineering companies are using powerful, yet easy-to-use functionality of a service centre service to increase their customer satisfaction levels.
A number of companies in the machine tool and engineering sector are utilising the powerful, yet easy-to-use functionality of Tesseract's Service Centre service management system to increase their customer service satisfaction levels through the effective and efficient use of field service engineers MACH exhibitors such as Edwards Pearson, HK Technologies, Hurco Europe and Mills Manufacturing Technology have all invested in the cost-effective software to enable them to more easily and accurately record customer service calls and to manage their service teams
This article was originally published on Manufacturingtalk on 19 Feb 2002 at 8.00am (UK)
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Sheet metalworking specialist Edwards Pearson (Hall 4, Stand 4606), which at MACH 2004 won the 'Best Forming/Fabrication Machine' award for the PR press brake, says Service Centre underpins its complete service operation and: "the software enables us to track and manage the complete service function, providing excellent visibility of spares logistics - which minimises engineers' non-productive (travelling) time.
Combined, these have a dramatic effect on our overall service performance levels," added the company.
"Crucially, because the software makes us so efficient, the result is that customers receive a higher level of service," it said.
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At machine tool and laser marker systems specialist HK Technologies (Hall 5, Stand 5357) Service Centre has not only transformed a manual process of call logging, monitoring and control for a varied mix of service tasks, but the software is also linked with an accounting package.
Maintaining separate databases but without duplicated data entry, the systems automatically update each other and this is particularly relevant when, for example, new customers are added, stock is replenished or invoices are raised in Tesseract.
Leading machine tool company Hurco Europe (Hall 5 Stand 5373) has long recognised that the benefits of combining the supply of high-quality, cost-effective machine tools with superlative levels of customer service are essential to success in today's fiercely-competitive marketplace.
The company also firmly believes that its policy of continual improvement across the entire business is key - and that includes the way it interacts with its customer base.
"Hurco has always been a very customer-focused company, and our customer care philosophy starts when the 'phone is answered," it said.
It was to improve its call management and engineer scheduling processes - as well as the inventory management of spare parts both within central stores and each engineer's car stock - that the decision was taken to replace an ageing Unix-based service management system with a modern package.
At the same time, the company wanted a system that would also allow the resulting customer/engineer/spare parts/invoicing information to be quickly and simply input by its field engineers and presented in real-time so that everyone in the company - whether managing director, accounts or service manager - could gain a realistic view of exactly what was happening in terms of customer interaction.
"The driver for our investment in Service Centre was to make us more efficient and able to provide customers with a better service, starting with the way we handle and manage their calls," said the firm.
"The system is certainly doing that, particularly by allowing us to capture the important details of each service visit or telephone call into the diagnostics desk." It is the opinion of everyone involved in customer service at Hurco that the technology has generated considerable improvements in terms of administrative time savings and paperwork, by eliminating time sheets and the time and effort taken to generate invoices from these.
But, importantly, Service Centre has also led to the introduction of new, streamlined methods of credit maintenance and improved customer service.
At Mills Manufacturing Technology (Hall 5 Stand 5261), another leading machine tool supplier, Service Centre is enabling the firm to: "Manage 98% of customer enquiries and requests automatically, leaving more time to effectively deal with the two per cent of enquiries that demand detailed personal attention." As will be demonstrated at MACH 2006, Service Centre comprises a suite of easy-to-use integrated modules to suit varying demands: Customer Assets - comprehensive records of multiple site, customer equipment installations with configuration options, contract, sub-contract and service level control.
* Call Control - effective call management in a response-critical environment.
* Parts Centre - an integrated multi-location stock control system designed for the control of service stock from warehouse to van.
* Repair Centre - Wizard-driven workshop system that allows for repair batching, full audit and user defined flow control.
* Quote Centre - Re-quote - for quotes based on previous quotes; Contract - for quotes based on existing contracts, and New - for new quotes.
Output in Crystal Reports.
* Prospect Centre - as well as capability that embraces customer tracking data and 'to do' tasks, the prospect management module retains full customer histories and seamlessly transfers these into Service Centre when required.
Developed using the Microsoft ASP model, Service Centre 4.2 can accommodate every type of mobile communications technology for remote engineer and customer access - including laptops, Nokia devices, WAP 'phones, XDAs, BlackBerry communicators and tablet PCs.
Visitors to Tesseract's MACH stand will also be able to learn about the increasing popularity of the 'why buy it if you just want to use it?' rental scheme and the 'pay as you go' Internet hosting facility for the browser-based software.
Both alternatives allow users to minimise costs.
* Tesseract at MACH 2006, NEC, Birmingham, UK, May 15-19, Hall 5, Stand 5002.
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