SMARTS©

SERVICE MANAGEMENT ANALYSIS, RECOMMENDATIONS, TACTICS & STRATEGIES (SMARTS)©

Typical Process :

We customize our service questionnaire for you to provide current data covering people, parts, and support systems.

We come to your main facility where you take us on a tour and introduce us to significant people.

You and your staff brief us on strategies, plans, goals, measurements and all pertinent situations concerning services and the interfaces to customers and support services.

We interview senior management of related functions including headquarters service managers and senior people of engineering, manufacturing, quality, finance, marketing, sales, purchasing, and anyone else who has ideas and challenges to share.

We visit representative company locations to observe and question personnel about their facts and perceptions regarding logistics support.

We identify potential improvements as the opportunity is observed and discuss them with the responsible person who can initiate change, often immediately.

We discuss the answers you provide to the questionnaire and any additional facts necessary for comparisons with our BestMarks© data on similar organizations.

We prepare a draft report and present it at headquarters to everyone you desire for face-to-face discussion. Gaps between where performance is and where performance should be will be identified. This process should assure accuracy and establish agreement that the situations identified can and should be changed. Many functions will already be improved.

We complete the written report, which you may provide to everyone interested.

We identify further improvement tasks that should receive more effort, along with recommended resources, schedules, costs and benefits.

You have the option to extend our contract to do the following phases, to carry on by yourselves, or to work with anyone else you choose.

Typical improvement topics include:

• Authorized Stock Lists (ASLs) of parts to balance customer restore and uptime service level agreements with stock locations and financial considerations.
• Benchmarking parts concerns to be as good as you should be 
• Broken and return call reduction
• Computer models and support systems
• Customer satisfaction measurement and management
• DOA / ELF / NTF reduction 
• Elimination of excess
• End of life planning
• Field Replaceable Unit (FRU) standardization
• Financial investment and expense reduction
• Forecasting and planning accuracy
• Initial provisioning refinements
• ‘Know Before You Go’ diagnostics influence on parts support
• Life cycle costs and profit analysis
• Measurements with goals and displays to stimulate attainment
• Opportunities to ‘think outside the box’
• Pipeline speeds and standard deviations
• Pricing and profit margins
• Process development and documentation
• Repair returns and process productivity
• Selling programs and services
• Strategic assistance for specific niches
• Stock investment versus courier tradeoffs
• Training, coaching, and continued support as desired