Makula: How SME machine suppliers and distributers can digitalise their after-sales services

Customer orientation and good service are now among the most important success factors in the industry – along with quality, of course. After-sales services not only serve customer loyalty, but are also increasingly crystallising as a source of income. This is particularly important for machine suppliers and distributors and Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEM), because industrial goods can have a long service life of up to 40 years. How do you retain customers over such a long period? Exactly: through services that facilitate repair and maintenance and even go beyond that. Industry 4.0 creates many opportunities. How do you build up suitable after-sales services and digitalise them?

The first step is to put yourself in the customer’s shoes and really anticipate what moves him or even hinders him. The customers and their needs are the focus.  Therefore, ask yourself the following questions:

• what inconveniences our customers?
• what distracts them from their core business?
• what poses risks for them?
• what are their current challenges?
• what could give it an edge over its competitors?

Then look at your own services and ask yourself the question:

• what competencies do we have that they need?
• what processes can we simplify for them, for example through digitalisation or automation?

Let’s fill these questions with life. We hear again and again from packaging OEMs and other machine suppliers that these are their main challenges in establishing after-sales services:

• Lack of remote access: customers are reluctant to grant direct remote access to machines.
• Outdated documentation: Manual ticket generation & knowledge sharing is simply taking too much time and leads to mistakes.
• Missing analytics: minimal to no analytics around maintenance processes
• Loss of business opportunities: Unable to monetise after sales service due to lack of infrastructure
• Service-level agreement (SLA) constraints: Inefficient maintenance processes & visibility

This sounds alarming, for sure. But it is still a good basis for making amends. Every single challenge can be solved. However, it is very expensive to develop and build the solutions yourself. This may not be a problem for large corporations. But an SME machine suppliers does not have the resources to develop such a large service package on its own.

That’s why we developed Makula.

Makula gives you access to a proven, existing system which enables SME machine supplier and distributors to digitalise their after-sales services and thus have the chance to monetise them.

Imagine that you could easily

• Report and document machine failures
• Receive machine maintenance and breakdown alerts
• Create and assign tickets in seconds
• Connect OEM engineers and customers through a chat function
• Access machine and spare parts documentation from any mobile device
• Remotely support your customers by an audio/visual functionality
• Consult previously documented problems to reduce dependency on OEM engineers
• Manage all your machines from one place

That’s what we call Machine Resource Management (MRM). Do you want to see how it works? We will be happy to share it with you!

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