Excessive downtime and issues with quality will understandably leave a bad taste in a fabricator’s mouth. That’s why it’s so important to properly vet an equipment provider not just for the machines they produce, but also for the service they provide.
The equipment providers that excel in the field of service and support prioritize the accessibility and availability of their service teams. They deliver on fast response times and boast knowledgeable, experienced technicians. Spare parts are always on hand and are ready to ship in a moment’s notice.
A next-level service provider, however, must go beyond those basic expectations. Customers appreciate swift resolutions, but they need more than that. They need to get to the next level with their operations – they need to learn how to program their jobs better, get more material out of their sheets and drive down their costs per part.
While that might not seem to be the responsibility of a service department, those goals can be achieved with the support of a next-level service provider. Heidi-Melanie Maier, vice president of technical services at TRUMPF Inc., says that the success of a machine also relies on the competency of the post-sales support team. Properly assessing an equipment provider’s abilities in that arena, however, requires open lines of communication.
“When it comes to productivity, it doesn’t matter to the customer which department has which responsibility,” she says. “What matters is that we provide them with good and proactive communication, so they don’t have to constantly ask for status updates on their service call. One really good tool for that is TRUMPF’s Service App, which has all of the communication concerning technical cases, spare part orders and machine status in one place.”
Clear communication
Establishing open lines of communication is essential for customers that need to plan around the availability of their equipment. But those channels must, of course, be established before the machine is purchased. In doing so, potential customers can assess whether an equipment provider can deliver the type of service and support they need.
“Service isn’t a one-size-fits-all situation,” Maier says. “There are the obvious situations we have to get right, like responding quickly when a customer has a machine down, good communication about the arrival of a service technician or the things that happen while our engineer is on-site, but we need to have deeper conversations with customers to really understand what they need from our service team.
“We have customers that are well-versed in operating our equipment and have strong maintenance teams,” she explains. “Understanding how to help them might look different from another customer that might come from a different situation.”
Fast solution times, experienced technicians and ample spare part availability are important attributes of a service provider, but that’s just scratching the surface.
“We need to understand their business model, their customers and how their production plans work,” Maier says. “We need to know what they do if a machine is down. Do they have backup capacity? Do they have an urgent job pending? Once we get to the root of that, we can properly base our support on their specific needs.”
Because TRUMPF offers some of the most advanced, cutting-edge technology available to fabricators, the service and support of such equipment could be seen as complicated. But Maier and her team don’t want that to be the case with their service offerings, which is why they offer three straightforward tiers of support.
“We offer remote support for a sensible flat rate; a maintenance service agreement with remote support plus a maintenance program; and a performance service agreement that has a flat rate on labor, spare parts and remote support,” she says. “Choosing between these packages starts with customer discussions to understand their needs and their level of expertise – whether they have a robust and established maintenance program or if they’re looking for us to support their maintenance needs.”
Through these candid discussions, TRUMPF can help customers identify which of the three service packages to choose. Customers should, of course, still ask about the basics, though. During the vetting process, it’s critical to understand an equipment provider’s access to spare parts and typical response times. Do they have parts here in the United States or are they sitting in a warehouse somewhere in overseas? Are there field service engineers in the local area and what is the typical time it takes to solve downtime events?
“When vetting an equipment provider, the biggest red flag would be a lack of transparency,” Maier says. “When a buyer is adding equipment to their production portfolio, they should know the size of the service organization, the installed base and the number of similar machines in the area to understand how often the service organization is supporting that kind of technology. What’s the typical response time? How fast does a customer get a callback? They can’t plan for everything, but during the buying decisions, these topics should be discussed.”
Establishing trust
Perhaps the most important question a customer should ask themselves is whether the equipment provider can be trusted. For TRUMPF, Maier says the answer to that question can be found in the level of transparency the service team provides.
“A key aspect of transparency is sharing our KPIs on everything we do,” she says. “Our customers can ask us any given day about our reaction times to their interactions with our service team.”
TRUMPF offers customers a “report card,” that bundles all a customer’s information in one place, for example, the type and number of machines they own and how many and what kind of service missions – installation, maintenance or repair – they’ve had. The company also measures the callback time to inquiries and the solution time to service cases, many of which can be solved remotely to get customers up and running even more quickly.
Another perk of transparency is being able to truly get under the surface of a service provider’s offerings. Without good communication, it’s nearly impossible to determine if certain tools or features are going to be effective or are just fancy bells and whistles.
“It’s imperative to help customers understand the benefits of a specific feature,” Maier says. “Let’s use condition monitoring as an example. We connect our customers’ machines, as well as our own machines, to our condition monitoring portal in the cloud to collect machine data, such as uptime and error codes. We analyze that data, which gives us the capability to predict when something bigger might be brewing. From there, we can offer advice to potentially change a certain program because the data shows, for example, that it’s creating a lot of collisions.”
Maier and the team at TRUMPF understand that connecting a machine to the cloud requires trust. And that’s why TRUMPF prides itself on creating a situation for safe data transmission. To offer customers the peace of mind they need, however, customers are encouraged to interface with their IT experts to “get into the weeds of what we’re doing, why we’re doing it and how we’re doing it safely.”
These deep conversations make it easier for customers to trust the technology and, perhaps equally important, understand the benefits cloud connections can provide.
“When looking at the benefits, it isn’t just about what can be gained right now,” Maier says. “Advancements in technology are happening so fast, so if you don’t do it now, you might miss out on important opportunities in the future. Imagine how service might look in two years with the speed in which AI is coming into the playing field.”
The long game
At this point, much of the focus on vetting a service provider has been on the pre-sale side. But once a machine is installed and has run for a while, Maier wants customers to keep the conversation going. In fact, she wants customers to grade the service they’ve received.
“Ask us again about the machine’s KPIs,” she says. “How many service cases did we have on it? What’s the overall consumption rate of spare parts? This can help customers assess the degree in which they need to cover the machine with our service agreements moving forward or where we need to partner with them on applications support. Perhaps the machine saw too many cases due to a lack of maintenance or other factors. This needs to be a regular check-in to truly assess how we’re doing.”
Looking forward, Maier also makes note of the various initiatives TRUMPF has embarked on to further provide customers with the service and support they need. One of those initiatives is called the Follow the Sun approach, which is aimed at increasing the availability of the company’s service team to customers.
“For the majority of our machines, our remote service team and in-house technicians are available from 6 a.m. to 2 a.m.,” she explains, “but some of our customers run two or even three shifts and may need our assistance in that short window of time where our hotline gets routed to Europe. The goal, however, is to have full 24/7 coverage with all support capabilities, including remoting into a machine and looking at condition monitoring data. We are approaching 24/5 and are working on closing the gaps by tapping into the international TRUMPF service network.”
Maier adds, however, that the company’s initiatives are also focused on proactive support. While the company will always apply the appropriate sense of urgency if a machine is down, getting in front of potential problems has long been a priority, too.
“We’re all about firefighting, but fire prevention is just as important,” she says. “We can never lose the empathy for how stressful a downed machine situation can be. Everyone at TRUMPF has to be aware of what the implications of a down machine can be, which is why we launched a training initiative for our customer-facing employees on the topics of urgency and empathy. Beyond the salient goal of getting the right technical knowledge to the right person at the right time, it’s equally crucial for us to be able to put ourselves in our customers’ shoes.”
To avoid machine issues altogether, tools such as TRUMPF’s condition monitoring through the cloud can be a big help. And the same can be said for the company’s many training opportunities where customers can learn better ways to program and design their parts. Overall, a company-wide approach to solving customers’ issues is driving significant, internal growth.
“We implemented a daily shop floor cascade where every technology team looks at how many cases came in the day before, how many are open overall, how many don’t have a solution and why, be it waiting for a spare part or still in the middle of troubleshooting,” Maier says. “The goal of these daily meetings is to ensure that we have clear escalation rules and to determine if we have the capacity to address outstanding issues.”
Always looking forward, Maier is keenly aware of the ways service will have to evolve to keep up with the industry’s rapidly evolving technology.
“We also need to get to the point where proactive software updates are the norm – in the same way they are for everyone’s iPhones or even their cars,” she says. “At TRUMPF, we’ve been having more discussions to identify new ways to keep our customers’ machines current with software updates. That includes pursuing the possibility to do complete software updates remotely without the need for a service technician on site, as we do with safety patches.
“Our development teams have placed a lot of focus on making software updates easier and more stable to take care of our installed base in the most proactive way,” she adds. “Evolving alongside these ever-advancing machines also means connecting as many machines as possible because that helps us troubleshoot better and implement AI solutions faster.”
To do all of this requires trust, she concludes. But when a customer and service provider can have candid conversations, partnerships form and success, inevitably, follows.
