You’ve handled project management issues, managed deployment timelines, got change management in place and solved the nightmare of data migration. All with a single, best-of-breed ERP implementation. However not much has been said and done about Service Management as part of your ERP’s best practices. What do you do to meet customers’ needs?
Core Service Management functionalities in your ERP will allow you to develop agreements and subscriptions, define resources, handle service orders and customer inquiries, and manage service delivery.
In spite of these basic features service personnel face business challenges such as:
- Inefficient management of after-sales service
- Improper segregation of service types
- Classification and arrangement of AMCs
- Inability to automate addition of new clauses in service
- Haphazard engineer-specific allocation of service issues and problems
- Inability to generate service reports with precision
If your ERP does not meet these requirements, consider a service management add-on. Essentially the add-on should facilitate seamless fully-connected after sales service. An efficient Service Management module should also allow you to:
- Optimize your service supply chain with complete inventory tracking
- Provide superior customer service checking on customer’s warranty agreement and the relevant issues
- Efficiently create and close agreements for service maintenance and other after-sales services
Must-have features include:
- Support tracing & tracking of service requests
- Manage contracts, invoice and pricing
- Appendage of new fields on new tasks allocation
- MIS reports for assessing SLA and order level
Good-to-have features include:
- Support multi-level object maintenance
- Sales order reference management for identifying service
- Real-time statistics on cost and revenue
Once you’ve incorporated a service management add-on that helps you accomplish most of these features you can expect to equip your business to manage after sales service activities efficiently, control overall costs, boost service performance management and proactively provide after-market services.