Boost maintenance service quality
Following the merger, the newly combined company, Konica Minolta, headquartered in Tokyo, channeled its energies internally for a period of time – at the expense of its focus on the customer. These services were an important revenue generator – accounting, for example, for 49% of revenue in the United Kingdom. Technicians often arrived late, weren’t prepared, or lacked the required expertise to fix devices used at the customer site. For companies that rely on a smaller number of high-efficiency, multifunction devices, this was a serious problem.
Moreover, as the imaging market became more competitive, customers began negotiating SLAs that were more favorable to themselves into the contracts for engineer support. To deliver according to these more demanding SLAs, Konica Minolta needed a reliable scheduling system to organize the field technicians – one that could help ensure that contractual demands were met. The inflexibility of the company’s existing scheduling system was also hampering the newly merged company’s strategic and commercial ambitions. Service delivery and quality plays a vital role in shaping a customer’s experience and future vendor selections.
The search was on for a new workforce scheduling solution. Technicians needed to arrive on time and their time had to be optimized. But even more important, technicians needed to arrive on customer sites in accordance with strict SLAs – and the right technicians had to be sent, who could complete repairs the same day, if at all possible. The solution also had to integrate with a complex network of interdependent systems, processes, and activities. For example, in the countries with the most significant service problems – including Germany, the United Kingdom, and France – Konica Minolta maintained all customer and service contract data in separate instances of the SAP® ERP application. SAP Workforce Scheduling and Optimization met all of these requirements. It also offered international support and was flexible enough to support three different service organizations in Germany covering office products, production printing, and the software solution business.
See how Konica Minolta increased their customer satisfaction from 50% to 80% in about a year.
