Innovation is not the first thing that springs to mind when you think of the concrete industry. But innovation and concrete go hand in hand at Putzmeister, a Germany-based global market leader of concrete pumps, machines, and vehicles that the construction industry requires to process and distribute concrete and mortar. For instance, in 2021 Putzmeister introduced the first emission-free, truck-mounted concrete pump, the iONTRON Hybrid, as a worldwide novelty.
Besides innovation, excellent customer service is a top priority for the company that employs more than 3,000 people and maintains a partner network in 90 countries.
Due to constant business growth, existing customer service processes became insufficient and the company knew it needed to introduce a state-of-the-art solution that would support harmonizing field service management processes from a local and regional level to a global rollout.
“We worked with SAP at various service locations in Germany, but service processes were heterogeneous and involved paperwork and manual feeds into the system. Although we captured a lot of data, the processes didn’t allow us to effectively leverage them and they often got stuck in PDF documents,” Bernhard Urban, head of Customer Service Germany at Putzmeister Concrete Pumps GmbH, said.
As a consequence, Putzmeister set out the following goals:
- Improve and streamline high-end customer service globally.
- Replace manual processes with modern, optimized, digitalized processes for field service management.
- Digitalize deployment planning of service technicians.
Introducing a Global Standard for Services Processes
To stay ahead of competition, Putzmeister decided to introduce a global standard for its service processes and select an innovative and digital solution to support planners, dispatchers, and service technicians with the following main objectives:
- More efficient resource scheduling
- Optimization of field technician assignments
- Harmonization, simplification, and digitalization of field service processes, including processing complex service reports with master data from SAP ERP
- Employee leveraging of inspection protocols
- Integration with mobile devices allowing field technicians to report time, material consumption, and expenses
- Sped up and digitalized shop-floor processes
The company found that SAP Field Service Management best suited its needs. The cloud-based solution helps digitalize field service and optimize operations while working to reduce environmental impact through efficient service delivery.
For the implementation of SAP Field Service Management, Putzmeister turned to Sybit, an NTT Data company. “The Sybit team has comprehensive experience in the area and provided valuable recommendations and guidance, especially in early project stages,” Urban said. That enabled Putzmeister to go live with a pilot in less than eight months and involved business process re-engineering and optimization. The cooperation with Sybit was very fruitful thanks to an agile project management approach, intelligent key user training, and field tests.
Establishing a New End-to-End Service Process
Service requests from customers are now entered into SAP ERP by the back-office team and automatically transferred into SAP Field Service Management for resource scheduling. Service technicians then receive a notification on their mobile device to confirm the order. At the same time, they get insight into inventory and can request the spare parts and materials they need.
When it comes to order execution, technicians can have all the information at their fingertips, including various inspection checklists related to service categories and images. They can do material availability checks from inventory, confirm used and no longer used components, and request additional supplies. The service report is then created on their mobile device and submitted to the customer for confirmation. Moreover, the solution allows service technicians to include additional details to create the invoice, such as actual time recording, unplanned activities, automatically calculated daily allowances, and other costs related to the on-site service.
The benefits Putzmeister achieved are:
- One harmonized, digitalized, and integrated service process for service locations in Germany and the global industrial technology team
- Optimized customer service thanks to instantly available information, such as machine data, operating hours, error quotes, and faster invoicing after order fulfillment
- A single source of truth for all information that helps increase service quality
- Transparent, digitally available, real-time service reports
- Increased productivity and time savings for planners, dispatchers, and technicians
- High user acceptance from service staff due to a modern user interface (UI), mobile access, and better insights to execute work orders
Preparing for an International Rollout
After the successful pilot implementation in Germany and first international rollout in Spain, Putzmeister wants to take the next step and roll out SAP Field Service Management to its global operations.
“The digitalization of field service management brings countless benefits, both for our customers and our employees, and helps us gain more efficiency,” Urban concluded.
Karin Fent is senior director of Global Customer Success Digital Supply Chain at SAP.