Industry Update, Australia: Cognizant’s AVP of Manufacturing, Logistics, Energy and Utilities Consulting Says Smart Use of Technology Helps Improve After-Market Services and Profitability
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“Although Australia’s manufacturing output has been trending downwards for some time now, the industry has shown that profitability levels can be raised in several circumstances,” writes Badrinath Setlur. “Today the smart use of technology can be applied to improving after-market services, enhancing profitability and driving growth.” Excerpts:
“The technology in question combines social media, mobility, analytics and cloud (SMAC) that can collectively help to create service excellence. SMAC can enable manufacturers to improve customer experience, create cross-selling and upselling opportunities and build lasting competitive advantage.
Manufacturers need to make the investments that will unlock new service strategies. The challenges they face in developing prudent aftermarket services—and the strategies required to counter them—are complex and demand painstaking cultural and operational changes. To meet these challenges, manufacturers must focus on developing an internal culture that fosters customer-centric services.
This must be complemented by a technology infrastructure that provides some quick wins and pays dividends over the long term.
There is no one-size-fits-all formula for the extent to which an organization adopts service strategies. Typically manufacturers need to transition from a reactive to a proactive approach to building customer services, and only by building long-term relationships will they be able to adjust to changing customer needs.
By assessing capabilities continuously, understanding customer needs, conducting a gap analysis and deploying mitigation strategies such as investment in new technologies, a manufacturer can progress along the service maturity path. A strong service development lifecycle can help further.
To achieve all this, a manufacturer needs to make holistic use of SMAC technologies and adopt the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) technology model to custom-build and/or deploy out-of-the-box software platforms capable of delivering new services.
When initiating aftermarket services strategies, manufacturers should set well-defined success criteria, measure success systematically and create mechanisms to incorporate the lessons they learn. The resulting corrective actions will help to fix realistic goals and show progress on the path to maturity during each successive period.
While manufacturers might face obstacles when beginning to implement aftermarket service strategies, they must challenge the status quo with an eye on the future. This will involve disruptive change, starting with the service culture and operating model, through building a new technology infrastructure around the SMAC stack. They must also establish competence and eventually outperform in the aftermarket.
Achieving these objectives will help forward-thinking manufacturers to serve the end-to-end needs of their customers better, facilitating a sustainable competitive advantage for the foreseeable future.”
Click below or here to read the article, first published in Industry Update, Australia’s leading publication for the manufacturing sector.
