Springboard to the digital

Companies need to offer their customers a seamless customer experience in the B2B environment. Companies have recognized this and are increasingly consolidating sales and service processes in a digital customer and service portal. No one can argue away the benefits anymore. For the manufacturing industry in particular, especially mechanical and plant engineering, a portal is a real benefit for customers and manufacturers, because things are complex here. Highly technical plants with a large number of components - up to 80,000 are quite realistic - nevertheless require convenient support for spare parts procurement and customer service.

With customer and service portals, the touchpoints within the customer journey are digitized - and thus deliver real added value. Hanging on hold or leafing through catalogs is no longer in keeping with the times and should no longer be expected of anyone. This is especially true for traditional industries such as mechanical and plant engineering, where spare parts procurement is often still handled via analog channels.

Here, the digitization of spare parts management through 3D-supported navigation in the machine ensures simple and reliable identification. The result is a pleasingly high initial solution rate. After all, finding the right spare part quickly is of course essential for the machine customer's production in order to reduce downtimes. Another advantage is that the order can be triggered immediately and the spare part is automatically registered and the stock updated in the portal. The digital machine file perfectly complements the spare part identification. The machine is digitally broken down into its individual parts, enabling a virtual overall view and reflecting the structure.

The service file offers concrete help in the event of service: If necessary, immediate help can be requested via the ticket portal or communicated directly with an AI-supported service bot.

Competitive advantage

For machine and plant manufacturers, innovative digital services are therefore a must today in order to differentiate themselves from the competition. In concrete terms, this means harnessing IoT data and using the digital twin to map and evaluate all machine data in real time.

What are the benefits? The condition of a machine can be monitored automatically 24 hours a day, seven days a week, i.e. 24×7, via condition monitoring.

Monitoring significantly reduces downtimes and ensures maximum plant availability - one of the most important factors in production. CPQ (Configure Price Quote) is directly linked to the customer portal as an upstream process to the service portal and as an interface to sales.

One side of the coin is the machine; on the other side are negotiations about quantities, customer discounts or special offers for customers who configure a particular machine. Likewise, it is possible to receive qualified support on a configuration. These are important items in e-commerce and sales, as an interface to the big picture, where all information and processes are brought together. The CPQ process turns the wheel between e-commerce and the sales system and provides the key advantage when it comes to enterprise-wide digitization, where a seamless customer experience is paramount.

Data quality is always just as important. Continuous data maintenance should be seen as a task of the specialist departments, and this means the reverse: If data maintenance has been neglected, time must be invested before the project starts. Clean master data maintenance makes it easier to find products and classify them according to their intended use. The user will thank you for it.

As in any major project, it is advisable to get all stakeholders around the table at an early stage: IT, the business departments and the management as sponsor. After all, what is at stake here is the company's overall strategy, which should serve as the foundation for digitizing processes.

The cloud or non-cloud strategy always presents itself as a point of discussion. What about the security of our sensitive data? Do I want to transfer it to the cloud or keep everything on-premises? The latter could be a Herculean task! It's the adoption of cloud systems that often results in lower administration overhead. Platforms today are defined by their scalability, and especially when building a customer portal, these capabilities are essential. The operation of an on-premises landscape can easily devour a lot of resources. Issues such as regional data storage are no longer a negative argument thanks to dedicated data center locations.