Engineering Maintenance Management (1985)

Introduction

Although this was a mini-computer supplier, computerisation of business functions was still slow, especially in this small Australian subsidiary of this US manufacturer. A lot of business systems were still typically paper based data collection keyed into batch systems for reporting.

We were in the process of bringing the spare-parts inventory control system on-line (which project was initiated from finance and audit). A new National Field Engineering Manager had been hired who had started asking questions that the existing systems could not support, such as device type failure rates, average cost to repair, customer call response times, etc.

Existing Systems

The spare-parts inventory management system is described elsewhere which introduced tracking of good parts taken out on service calls and the non-equivalent part swap-out process.

A customer equipment maintenance contract system had records of all equipment under service but was primarily an invoicing system.

Every service call had a work-sheet completed detailing call, response, travel and completion times, equipment repaired, parts used, etc. A local system had been developed for data entry of this data and some basic reporting had been developed. The annual budgeting system used gross counts of staff and service calls to compute utilization and combined with equipment population and sales projections, produced projected staff requirements.

Enhancements - Stage 1

The first stage was to enhance the work-sheet data entry application with full data validation of customer contracts, equipment, spare-parts and engineers. The database created for the spare-parts inventory system, with its transaction logging facility, was enhanced to record the work-sheet data with improved data structures and indexing for better reporting. Outputs from this system them automatically fed into the annual budgeting process supplying actual totals for the year.

Some interesting results were starting to be seen in the reports from this data, which lead to the decision to go ahead with a full Call Centre System.

Enhancements - Stage 2 - Call Centre Management

There were two key drivers for the call-centre system. First was to capture and validate customer call information while the customer was still on the phone, including precise identification of the equipment at fault. We had found a number of customers were not putting all their equipment under service contract and were logging so-called contract service calls for non-contract equipment (this was especially easy with terminals - a customer might have 20 terminals under contract, but in fact have 100, often bought via the "grey market").

The second driver was to maximise engineer productivity. The engineer would call in job completion from the customer site, being lead through a predetermined list of responses to capture his full "job sheet" including (for the first time) the actual device id of the equipment being repaired.  He could then be directed immediately to his next call without having to return to the depot.

Successes

All in all, the above systems proved very successful. Three successes stand out.

First, by exactly identifying the equipment items being serviced, we were able to bring a lot of "grey" equipment under contract.

The volume of terminals being serviced by "swap-out" brought to light the idea of having a service van just full of terminals, circulating in the city with a courier who could do the "swap-over" rather that incurring the cost of a full engineer service call.

By the end of the first year when we started analysing device type failure rates and cost-to-repair, it became obvious that a particular model of terminal was so fault prone, that its average cost-to-repair was not covered by the contract service price. A heavily discounted replacement sales programme was put into place to upgrade all these devices to more modern, more reliable types.  This was a result that our American head-office had not even picked-up on.