Service Statements v1.5

Telematics brings technology to our service business. For decades we have struggled with a declining market share of labor on construction, mining, forestry and light industrial equipment. In my experience this started accelerating in the early 1970’s. At the end of WWII most of the equipment manufacturers were specialists. There were tractor companies and loader companies, excavator companies and truck companies, etc…  In the 1970’s several suppliers started offering more model families to customers to provide a one source option to them. This put incredible pressure on the dealers to keep up. They had to cope with new tooling requirements and personnel skills to name two major elements. They also had to deal with warranty failures.

The typical response from the dealers with this increase in warranty labor was to drop something of less importance. The first thing to go was maintenance.  This thinking persists even today in the minds of many Service Managers. Maintenance is less important than a repair. Well a lot of customers believed in maintaining their equipment to manage equipment operating costs. They were right then and they continue to be right. So what did they do? They hired one of the mechanics from the equipment dealer to do their maintenance work.  This then morphed into non-technical work as well. This took us down the slippery slope of ever declining market share in labor. This also led to .lower market share of parts as the customer mechanics didn’t have the same loyalty to the OEM brands.

Now arriving on the scene are telematics and computer diagnostics. We will know with either GPS connections of cellular signals where every machine is on the planet. AND we will know the condition of machines and components based on where the telematics are installed. We can determine if an air filter is plugged, or an engine is overheating, or if a machine is idling. This is significant. We can monitor the health of the machine for the customer form our “Telematics Technical Command Post.”  This TTC will be like mission control for NASA. We can have alerts when predetermined conditions exist that would initiate a call to the customer. We will have the TTC manned by skilled technical personnel. We can sell this service to our customers as a tool to allow them to reduce their owning and operating costs and preserve their equipment residual values.  Shouldn’t we get going on this now? After all those are two of the main reasons for our existence in this Industry; Reduce Owning and Operating Costs and Preserving the Residual Value. The time is now.