Your Sales department will form a variety of agreements with customers, from agreements about installations with and without maintenance, simple rates or complex full-service contracts, standard or extended guarantees, to agreements about special rates for break downs occurring outside office hours. If these agreements are not set up correctly and uniformly, problems are almost certainly going to arise in their fulfilment and invoicing. Invoicing is likely to be time-consuming and prone to errors since each invoice must be compared against previous invoices, the budget and the original quotation. This all brings additional costs, ties up capacity and results in dissatisfied customers. All this, while your aim is to give the customer individual service.

Maintenance managers and MRO stock managers are increasingly encountering the apparent dichotomy to increase service levels and save costs at the same time. A dilemma that can be resolved with an in-depth analysis of the spare parts requirement, stock-holding and related costs, order times and internal processes.

Planning for fault reports and regular maintenance is a continual balancing act between the need to provide a good service to the customer on the one hand and the availability of capacity and parts on the other.
To be able to make the right decisions, clarity about the object being maintained and the location is required. Where fault messages are handled by a call centre, it is essential that a complete script is followed. The product data for the object must be instantly available so you know which parts are affected. Equally important is being able to see information on the availability of parts and engineers who are qualified for the job. Finally, you need to be able to effectively assess the priority. If these aspects have not been properly catered for, that is when things can and frequently do go wrong: an unqualified engineer is sent out with the wrong materials, regular maintenance is not scheduled or fault messages are not given the right priority. This represents a waste of money and capacity and will give the customer reasonable grounds for complaint.

Where are your engineers when a machine unexpectedly breaks down? Which engineer has the right skills and can be on site first? How long should an engineer work on a specific solution? The answers to these questions provide a way into effectively streamlining your maintenance and service processes. In practice, you will only know these things if the engineer sees the benefit of and co-operates in providing this information. This information will not only tell you where engineers are, but also for example how long a specific type of maintenance takes. Only then will you be able to plan properly and make and keep to agreements with the customer.