INDIA’S FIRST MONTHLY NEWS & ANALYSIS ON CONSTRUCTION & INFRASTRUCTUREMAHENG/2011/38968

ARCHITECTURE CONSTRUCTION ENGINEERING Vol 4 Issue 1 • Pages 144 • February 1, 2014 • `100/- • www.aceupdatemagazine.com

An I-Tech Media Publication

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For many years, aftermarket in most companies has been a support function. Once a product is sold, aftermarket

team’s role was to fulfil commitment given during product sale. However, with economic downturns and shrinking new product sales, companies, management and stakeholders are recognising the virtues of sustained revenues from aftermarket functions. From a cost centre, aftermarket is emerging as a profit centre in many automotive and construction equipment OEMs and at their dealer organisations.

For aftermarket function to deliver and attain maximum benefit, organisations must have a clear strategy supported by appropriate process to monitor and review complete set of activities across the entire service chain (OEM-dealers, distributors and partners).

An effective aftermarket strategy not only contributes significantly for revenue, or has significant cost and differentiation advantages, but also helps in better brand promise (delivered as promised during sales). This increases customer satisfaction, and satisfied customer means re-purchase and referrals.

Aftermarket ERPAs most of the companies are realising that an integrated ERP encompassing maintenance, repair, service agreements, spare sales, rental, re-marketing and re-manufacturing areas are must to comprehensively manage aftermarket functions, they are looking for solution that can handle all these areas. An integrated aftermarket ERP must also cover support divisions of training, assets, tools, support desk, planning, vendor/partner management, float etc. to help manage the complex web of aftermarket relationships.

Quest’s aftermarket ERP is an enterprise class comprehensive system consisting of parts, product sales, service, support

desk, re-man, float, training, rental, remarketing, assets, and tools and planning modules. It can be easily configured for any company’s supply chain and aftermarket structure. The application offers hassle-free multitransactional view of order to delivery and comes with more than 500 pre-defined reports including MIS reports, daily, weekly and monthly tracking reports, and deviation reports.

Quest aftermarket ERP help companies in standardisation of process, visibility and effective control across the complete value chain. The application is designed to make life simpler and transparent for OEM and dealers. The system comes with SMS option and can easily integrate with any legacy system. Quest aftermarket ERP has in built intelligence to track parts availability, service levels, parts performance, lost sales, auto allocation and warranty management. The system addresses various elements in aftermarket eco system be it machine sales, parts management or service management.

Quest aftermarket ERP helps in efficiently managing post-sales process

An effective aftermarket service strategy requires companies to define on-site, off-site repair & replacement procedures, approvals and service completion

Rudresh S Basavarajappa CEO & Chairman, Quest Informatics Pvt. Ltd.

Quest aftermarket ERP helps companies in standardisation of process, visibility and effective control across the complete value chain

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Industry woes and Quest aftermarket ERPIn the absence of a comprehensive system to monitor and track the following entities, OEMs face lot of challenges. • Parts availability, service level, parts

performance, lost sales, efficient inventory management, service handling and revenue leakages.

• Service engineers’ performance,scheduling, travel details, service history, service reminders, service planning, MTTR and MTBF.

• Differenttypesofmachinesalesfollow-

ups, invoice procedures with defined access to users across locations.

• Performanceofdistributionchannel forparts, services and sales.

• Training, all levels of planning,management of assets and tools.

Benefits of Quest aftermarket ERPCompanies are gaining substantial revenue and sustainable advantage by investing in a comprehensiveaftermarketERPsystemthatbenefits them in several ways. These are:

• Significantlyboostsaftermarketrevenue,profitability and cash flow.

• Efficiently manages spares, services,sales,re-man,rental,CSAetc.

• Reducestheriskofsupplychainfailures.• Leverages service differentiation by

improving overall customer experience.• Can scale from region, country and

location level seamlessly.• TimelySMSandemailnotifications.• Reduction in cost by systematic

planning.• Accessdefinedrolesandcontrols.

Most of the enterprise solutions in the market have concentrated on new sales and functions around it, whereas their focus is less in the aftermarket process. While other enterprise solutions typically require 12-24 months for implementation, Quest’ssolutions can be implemented in 3 months, thus reducing cost of implementation significantly. In fact,many of the large SIand enterprise product companies see them as complementary players. Their solutions come with industry expertise; they represent

their collective wisdom of business rules applicable to heavy equipment, automotive, powerandotherindustries.Astheproductsare unique in aftermarket space, they can complement and co-exist with otherenterprise class solutions.

QuestInformaticsforovertwodecadeshasbeensuccessfullydeployingvalue-enhancingand high-quality enterprise class products,services and solutions for OEMs of various heavy equipment, automotive industries and their dealers. The company identifies, understands customers’ pain areas in aftermarket and offers them the right solution to improve customers’ critical processes. Theyprovide flexibility to companies to pick and choose the solutions suitable to their needs and requirements.

Today their leadership and expert teams having deep domain knowledge and high technology capabilities have manifested in world-class products and gold standardservices that are used by global majors in automotive, construction, medical, industrial and heavy equipment, and agricultural product industries.

Quest Informatics satisfied list of clients that includes Fortune 500 companies, SMBand multinationals in India and abroad. Quest has deployed enterprise-scaleproducts, meeting global standards at various client organisations. n

After market today has become a key revenue stream and customer engagement strategy.

Satheesh Srinivasa,Managing Director, Quest Informatics Pvt. Ltd.

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