Companies from the mechanical and plant engineering, mobility and related industries are generating more and more revenue from their service business. Especially with capital assets that are in use for many years, good services pay off as a differentiating feature in global competition.
Digitalization and the Internet of Things (IoT) offer manufacturers the option of further increasing service revenues. CONTACT Software supports this with a new building block for its Elements for IoT platform. Customer Services accelerates and improves the processes in customer business: they run highly automated and across systems from quotation to invoicing right into the ERP.
Customer Services automatically provides cycle- or event-driven templates for various service cases. For scheduled maintenance intervals, the solution generates a document with the respective items for tasks, material and workload. As soon as plant components fall below or exceed thresholds, customers automatically receive a suitable quotation for spare parts. Incoming orders are routed to the ERP system, so that a component can be replaced before it fails.
Customer Services also supports pay-per-use practices using the analyzed operating data in CONTACT Elements for IoT. Here, customers do not buy the machine or line, but pay for its performance. For this purpose, the utilization times are logged and automatically billed. With this business model, manufacturers position themselves as innovative providers and tap additional sales potential.
Offering many customers reliable digital services anytime, anywhere in the world requires a robust infrastructure. CONTACT Software meets this through the multi-tenancy architecture of its IoT platform and its IoT applications. The end-to-end multi-tenancy capability ensures that each individual client has exclusive and secure access to all data and functions of his assets and their digital twins.
"Customer Services empowers manufacturers to upgrade their product offerings with smart services", says Dr. Nicole Göckel, Product Manager IoT at CONTACT Software. "Digital processes improve machine availability and performance during operation, increase customer satisfaction and enable companies to expand their service business".
