Hi guys. This is my first blog here and I would begin with a caselet to see how important IT is even for a small business. Please give your suggestions as to how the company could have done better.
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HML is a leading alternate energy solution provider that provides services to numerous companies in North India. It requires generators, batteries, invertors and spare parts for these product lines. HML has 30 sales cum services offices in North India.HML service workshop provides 2 types of services: one preventive-cum-routine maintenance and second on call basis.It tries to offer an uptime of 98% for most of its products that are covered under preventive maintenance schemes.It also offers warranty of 1 month on all call basis repairs.
Customers who have HML products are quite happy but services offered are not as per claims. HML has a large workforce of 100 employees at its service workshop to handle on an average about 300 complaints on daily basis. Due to large number of service requirements, a large amount of inventory of spares is needed to be maintained.
Thus the basic challenge HML is facing is to manage the spare parts inventory and to keep the service schedule for better customer satisfaction. This requires the replacements of critical spares, testing of various systems and regular servicing etc. It was found that items received at Service workshop were not serviced properly during "preventive maintenance" and hence it leads to load increase at service workshop.
Food for thought:
What do you think are the problems being faced by HML and what kind of Information System would help HML achieve serivce level of 98%?
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30 sales offices employing 100 people is certainly a good number for an after-sales force but depends ultimately on the product reach & customer base. Actually the case for spares is kinda confusing. Items such as batteries & generators have long lifetimes; battery is the only bottleneck in terms of no.years of useful life…but still the battery lifetime could easily be 18-20 months even in the extreme temperatures of north india. So essentially for routine maintainance, stocking for only low value items required. Solution is to have marginal items available in good no. in all 30 after-sales offices. Break down the 30 after sales offices into 5 zones and have stocking of high value items in only in 5 places. The new inverters, batteries & gen sets etc would be required only under AMC and in the event of failure reported by customer. This, I guess would help keep your inventory levels low. Also, have a layered call tracking for customer service…so call gets logged centrally at the HO, say Delhi..then diverted to Uttarakhand..Uttarakhand SO would have to tie up with its sub-dealer/ agent to resolve the problem, to report the matter in the system back to the HO. If not reported within a fixed time frame depending on problem to be solved, the pending call would further get escalated at abt 2-3 levels in the HO.
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