Streamline service operations and reduce costs

Copyright © 2009 James Taylor. Visit the original article at Streamline service operations and reduce costs.

Ed Staats of ServicePower presented on how to use an economic downturn to your advantage, streamline service operations and reduce costs. With the current economic downturn many companies feel they cannot make changes but Ed focused on SaaS and managed services as ways to innovate operations without large investments. SaaS is clearly a focus for a lot of companies focused on driving down their total cost of ownership while easing deployment, scalability and cost effectiveness. Indeed 37% of companies in a Gartner study say they are considering replacing an existing on-premise system with a SaaS one.

Ed walked through a case studyof a consumer appliances company with 7,000 sales locations. They found that they had two problems. They needed a better solution to manage their own service agents, especially in handling traceability. They also needed to improve their ability to find and manage third party servicers for areas they could not cover with their own agents. They wanted a solution that would let them scale up or down depending on the economy. They had specific problems in how service was requested and scheduled as well as too many exchanges because they could not schedule service in some areas.

To resolve this they worked with ServicePower to get both a SaaS product to manage their own agents and the ability to bring third parties in for out of network coverage. They liked the SaaS offering because they did not feel that their process was really differentiating and because they wanted to minimize their up front investment. They were able to get up and running in just a couple of months and saw immediate results – reducing the time to schedule service out of network by 80% and reducing exchanges done in lieu of service by 50%. They also improved their traceability in managing their own network while avoiding hiring any new staff. Overall they estimated a 40% reduction in their cash outlay by using SaaS.

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Ed suggested that folks considering SaaS make sure they understand if their process is really a differentiator, focus on the TOTAL cost of ownership and consider the scalability of the solution in a dynamic environment.

While Ed did not get much chance to talk about ServicePower it was pretty clear that it supports decision management and I am looking forward to seeing it. This was blogged out of sequence.

Don’t forget to check out the white paper I have at decisionmanagementsolutions.com/warranty