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Optimising remote technical support

Sanden Intercool Kenya is the East African arm of the global-leading Sanden Intercool brand of commercial refrigeration solutions. They predominantly supply and maintain chillers and coolers to the pharmaceutical, food and beverage industries in Kenya and surrounding countries, with major customers, including well known international brands.

Aftersales service, including maintenance and troubleshooting, required technicians to write out job cards by hand in the field. This was causing a few problems. Firstly, serial numbers were frequently mismatched or incorrectly captured, which led to stock issues, with units showing as being still in the warehouse when they were in fact installed at a customer. This meant that records of services and maintenance were inaccurate, and there was a lack of accuracy and visibility into the process.

Assigning technicians to troubleshoot issues was also challenging. With no visibility into their current location, the closest person may not have been assigned to attend to a problem. Technicians in the field also do not come into head office every day; over the course of two weeks, they collected multiple job cards, which needed manual capturing in batches. This is an inefficient process that left much room for human error.

More effective remote technical operations

“We had a significant problem with data quality that was making it difficult for us to effectively service customers. We needed a solution that would eliminate these laborious manual processes and give us greater visibility into our maintenance and troubleshooting process, and give clear guidance to the back-end customer support team and tech team,” says Harish Nargundkar, business development manager at Sanden Intercool Kenya.

FIELDForce from MACmobile offered a solution. Sanden Intercool Kenya now has a platform that enables technicians to scan the barcode of the refrigeration unit to ensure the serial number is accurately captured and allows job cards to be filled digitally in the field, eliminating manual processes and reducing the risk of error.

“Although FIELDForce is traditionally used as a sales enablement tool in the fast-moving consumer goods space, it lends itself perfectly to this scenario as well. As a technician tracking and stock management tool, it gives Sanden Intercool Kenya end-to-end visibility and line of sight into their after-sales service and equipment maintenance processes,” says Muhoro Gathii, country sales manager for Kenya at MACmobile.

Now that Sanden Intercool Kenya’s master data has been cleaned, they benefit from a 100% accurate master list of stock in the warehouse and in the field. They are able to schedule preventative maintenance more effectively and assign service calls accurately based on the current location of technicians, thanks to GPS tracking in the FIELDForce app. This optimises logistics and reduces service costs, while improving efficiency and reducing turnaround time on repairs.

Digitally captured job cards in the field reduce human error as well as the workload for customer services teams, in addition to reducing the time to report back to customers on their maintenance jobs. Job cards are all online and can easily be downloaded and sent right after maintenance or repairs have been completed, improving customer satisfaction.

In addition, MACmobile has also assisted the client in spare parts management. Moving away from manual stock sheets, Sanden Intercool Kenya now has line of sight of their available stocks at a click of a button. Capturing spare parts movement is much easier, allowing for the smoother assigning of them to technicians and accounting on them is more effective.

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