With new equipment sales decreasing, competitive companies seek new ways to increase their revenue and customer loyalty. Aftermarket services address revenue and profitability challenges through innovation.
Profitability through services has consistently contributed more to a company's profit — often nearly 45% — further emphasizing the need for better service scalability. Connected assets are a critical enabler to monitor, control and optimize services throughout the value chain.
Connected assets enable:
- Remote service: Provides a quick return on investment without immediately changing the entire value chain. Products are equipped with sensors to monitor health and performance and provide much-needed asset information to client service agents and field technicians. This helps deliver an accurate solution faster and reduces equipment downtime while increasing customer loyalty. The opportunity to further upsell or cross-sell acts as an additional revenue generation stream by knowing the composition of the current equipment and its performance against standard expected metrics.
- Analytics: Helps make informed data-driven decisions that include:
- Predictive maintenance (i.e., service visits, potential failures and alerts).
- Real-time information on product usage.
- Scope for business optimization provides an opportunity to integrate business systems made possible through IoT. Specific services can be offered or billed according to the available real-time data and help automate processes (i.e., parts ordering, warranty claim management, customer support, asset tracking and fleet management. Integrating these business processes offers a value-added benefit to the client's operational efficiency.
- An ability to transform customer experience with additional product value being enhanced quickly and at a lower cost through software upgrades of the connected systems. This focuses on usability while increasing the shelf life of the product.
Business areas can gain the benefit of instant revenue with connected systems for aftermarket services through the following:
- Remove false claims: Operating conditions could be monitored to help establish genuine warranty claims.
- Improve design: Manufacturers can gain better insights into the performance of the equipment while offering better features and functionalities with quicker and improved design.
- Reduce inventory costs: With insight into potential failures, manufacturers can better plan their inventory levels and increase sales of their high-margin parts.
- Decrease service costs: By equipping field technicians with information on equipment configuration, performance, usage, etc., they can provide better service.
- Increase first-time fix rates.
- Enable remote servicing: Decrease unplanned equipment downtime while reducing travel costs.
Now, manufacturers can utilize technology to improve gains from aftermarket services and perceive profitability as a true differentiator through IoT. Converting data into accurate information can act as a competitive edge for quick decision-making capabilities and increase customer loyalty through proactive insight-based engagement.
