The company has consolidated information on maintenance and repair of customers' equipment in geographically dispersed branches.
One of the key success factors for companies specializing in equipment sales is efficient organization of service and repair. Speed and quality of the services provided are the key to a distributor's competitiveness, especially when it comes to corporate sales and maintenance of professional equipment, the forced downtime of which is costly. Besides, availability of specific repair and diagnostic equipment, qualification and competent organization of personnel's work is important for the distributor. Warranty and post-warranty service management requires careful monitoring of multiple orders, tracking the progress of work, controlling the timing of requests and workload of staff, timely replenishment of stock of spare parts.
Obviously, as the distributor's business grows, it is impossible to effectively organize the work with thousands of requests for technical inspection and repair without a corresponding module in the ERP-system. In 2010, the decision to implement the maintenance and repair module was made by "Vostochnaya Technica", an official dealer of Caterpillar, Metso Minerals and SULLAIR in Western and Eastern Siberia, Yakutia and the northern part of the Far East. The project was driven by the need to consolidate information about maintenance and repair of customer equipment in geographically dispersed branches. "Vostochnaya Technica" offers a full range of specialized equipment: bulldozers, dump trucks, pipelayers, hydraulic excavators, gas piston and diesel generators, and technical support services, which include both spare parts and full service. More than half of the company's staff is involved in the after-sales service. "Vostochnaya Technica" has large service centers in Novosibirsk and Irkutsk and over 20 service platforms in Siberian and Far Eastern Federal Districts. The company has a lot of customers, the range of machinery and equipment is constantly expanding and being updated, the information about the potential and current orders for the service support has to be systematized and carefully monitored.
Before introduction of Odyssey Consulting Group specialized solution in 2010, maintenance and repair database was incomplete and not sufficiently reliable, and the work with the orders was getting complicated. The company needed a service module which would be compatible with the existing ERP system. A solution was soon found: Odyssey Consulting Group, a longstanding and trusted partner of "Vostochnaya Technica" in implementing Microsoft Dynamics AX-based products, offered its own Plant Maintenance module, which is used by many manufacturing and distribution companies around the world, such as such major companies as Wheelabrator Group and Met-Pro Corporation.
In fact, the integrator had to organize information on maintenance and repair orders, automate the calculation of staff timesheets, provide tools for planning the income and expenses for the services provided, track the progress of service work, and store service history. Module offered by Odyssey Consulting Group took into account all "Vostochnaya Technica" requirements. Today the functionality of Odyssey Consulting Group solution is employed in all the processes that are connected with service maintenance of the equipment in the regional representative offices of the company.
"Vostochnaya Technica" highlights a number of advantages of the implemented solution. First of all, with the introduction of the system, information on objects purchased by customers (machinery and equipment) is stored in a single database. The base includes a directory of service objects, which displays the characteristics of equipment, planned and completed operations with customer equipment in the context of individual cost projects, information on warranty periods of the products sold. Service work can be grouped by objects: new equipment, used equipment, rental fleet - and types of work (external and internal). Data on orders are used not only by the service department, but also by the sales department - for example, employees responsible for the sale of spare parts - and the accounting department. The order-order system in the "Vostochnaya Technica" database allows you to track the history of service and repair orders and record the status of work performed. It is possible to check the term of execution of the order, overhead costs, used spare parts for each operation. Based on these data, forecasts for further works are formed, offers for customers are created, prices are reviewed, etc. All necessary supporting documents (invoices, certificates, etc.) can be generated after the execution of the order. The maintenance and repair module implemented by Odyssey Consulting Group allows to analyze the distributor's staff productivity.
According to Olga Bushuyeva, Microsoft Dynamics AX support specialist at "Vostochnaya Technica": The solution helps to understand how efficient the employees are during the day, what their work time is spent on, identify possible downtime at each stage of order execution, and optimally plan the employment of our personnel with future orders The module also provides the ability to prepare reports on employee employment and determine paid and unpaid work hours. As a result of the Odyssey Consulting Group module implementation, "Vostochnaya Technica" has obtained a system of accounting for the cost of service work. If before the calculation was done manually and was not available in the ERP-system, then with the launch of the module all the costs and revenues of the service departments are clear and transparent. The solution provides capabilities for analysis and reporting of provided services, forecasting of time and financial expenses for repairs.
Maintenance services play an important role in the structure of "Vostochnaya Technica" business. The company's customers - legal entities - are interested in minimizing the costs associated with downtime of purchased machinery and equipment. Odyssey Consulting Group's maintenance and repair solution based on Microsoft Dynamics AX helps the distributor optimize work with customer requests and increase staff efficiency. Thanks to this project, "Vostochnaya Technica" was able to increase the speed of order processing, quickly track operations within the service, evenly distribute the available resources (technical personnel) and manage the stock of spare parts, and accurately account for all types of costs for maintenance of equipment.
Olga Bushuyeva, Specialist for Microsoft Dynamics AX "Vostochnaya Technica": With the help of Odyssey Plant Maintenance solution we were able to formalize service processes, reduce the equipment downtime, increase the speed and quality of service for our customers, effectively manage the income and costs of this area
