It’s a common pitfall: new company owners, just starting out looking for their first forklift, or commercial vehicle. They are tempted by the retail price, but then fall victim to higher servicing costs, or more frequent ones. Even known problems with that product will have been overlooked through a lack of experience.
Fortunately, this naivety is seldom seen in the types of businesses that have grown to the point of needing an EAM like Shepherd or an ERP like NetSuite. This blog takes a look at some of the tools Shepherd customers often use to make the cost analyses those novice company founders above would have been grateful for.
Smarter Service
There are two F’s that can easily be attributed to Shepherd’s EAM solution, whichever modules are activated: Flexibility and Filters. Between those two the types of reports that can be produced, based on a customer’s specific needs is pretty expansive.
Shepherd users will often offer break-fixes to their customers and staff: a filtered list of actions based on the problem, much like a trouble-shooting list for a home appliance, but of greater complexity—and impact.
Such information can be offered on the service order, designed to shorten the time needed to diagnose the solution to a given problem. With each added symptom—cross-referenced with the make and model of asset—the list varies, and refines. Sources are often the manufacturer, or the customer. It’s Shepherd’s aforementioned flexibility that makes storing and selecting such information easy.
The suggested actions can even come with a percentage of incidence to further help prioritise, since the sooner the right option is found, the sooner operations can resume, and with them, billing and revenue.
A Repository of Experience and Insight
Sources can also be from technician feedback, or Support Desk dialogues, and is essentially a compiled accumulation of experience. Collating this information is one of the strengths of Shepherd’s ability to attribute reports and service history to particular assets, the data from which can then be compared with other assets of the same make and model, for example.
So, what this also paves the way for is a growing ability to predict the service life and costs of a given asset, beyond merely its purchase price. And with that, a far more informed opinion on what is a cost-effective asset to buy when several options are available.
Another aspect of collating all these service reports, and cross-referencing with error codes, is the ability to produce failure and cause analysis as well as correlating those to a remedy code. Here, successful actions, matched to the error codes that prompted them, can be evaluated for success rates, and help technicians understand which should be their first action based on the probability of success.
Reporting is possible based on any number of categories and criteria: make, model, equipment type, or perhaps even the age of equipment. You can compare assets in different environments and see if that impacts their service life: maybe one in a coastal region, one in an arid zone. You can see if technicians are achieving similar service life results on the same contract but under different training regimes or in different subsidiaries.
Additional Potential
The result is a component of what might contribute to SOPs for technicians, as well as a cost analysis for those future purchases. It all depends on what the user decides to focus on and record. The result is a repository of past experiences and outcomes that lets a company make a clear comparison between the cost or savings of a particular asset acquisition compared to the cost or savings of the accumulated servicing and downtime over its service life—in a nutshell, is a the cheaper machine to buy actually the cheaper one to own. This is arguably the type of information a company (established or nascent) should be glad to have on hand.
Depending on the size of the company and the extent of their stored experience, this information could even represent a resource in itself: something the manufacturer might wish to consult as a means of improving their own products and competitiveness, rather than relying solely on their own in-house testing and market research.
If these sorts of insights appeal to you, as they should, or you want to know how you could achieve them more effectively, why not book a demo with Shepherd today?
