Hexagon Customer Story

Hexagon’s field service organization is around 2,000 people distributed globally. Their service engineers cover everything from installation commissioning to turnkey development for automated production lines. Routine service activity takes between 24 hours and 3 weeks, depending on the machine.

Before implementing ServiceMax, Hexagon’s field service organization was operating in a decentralized model. Every country and local entity had their own service system ranging from Excel to pen and paper to homegrown applications. Mark Wilding, Director of Global Service & Support at Hexagon, explains, “To aggregate data and understand our global performance was quite challenging. To understand why utilization and effectivity of our engineering teams were the areas we needed to focus on and prioritize for development was pretty impossible.”

This made it difficult to establish global best practices that could drive further improvements for their customers. Hexagon knew they wanted a tool that could provide better insight into their service and customer data.

“We were capturing very little data. Therefore, we couldn't feed service info back into our design developments and operational improvement.”

Hexagon assessed three field service management solutions, and ServiceMax came out on top. ServiceMax was able to win Hexagon over with the mobile product.

“We wanted mobile connectivity with the ability to sync offline, so that when our engineers worked in an industrial environment with bad signal, they could still perform their tasks and capture all the information they needed without internet or cellular connection,” Wilding shares.

After selecting ServiceMax, Hexagon laid out their main objectives, which included:
- Streamline service processes
- Reduce back-office inefficiencies, like entering the same info into multiple systems
- Harvest the data from ServiceMax

To work towards their objectives, they rolled out the initial out of box ServiceMax functionalities, including scheduling, quoting, debriefing, parts management, and billing. Hexagon has a broad range of hardware due to the brands they have acquired over the year, so they also use ServiceMax as a place to store those product details for their engineers.

“Our next steps we’re moving towards are the asset management and the data connectivity,” Wilding explains.

To achieve a successful implementation like Hexagon’s, it’s important to “know your business set up and understand the variety of processes you have when you began rolling out to different locations. Establish your core business processes and align to a single structure as much as possible,” explains Wilding.

Tasks that used to be incredibly manual and repetitive are now easy and streamlined for everyone involved. With an integrated system, daily actions, like ordering parts, have been sped up. Less time used on Hexagon’s side means less unplanned downtime for the customer.

“We're now looking at how we are going to connect our system data feeds into ServiceMax so that we can move more into an asset-centric preventative maintenance regime. Service managers will be notified when a machine needs a visit before there are any failures or impacts on the quality or integrity of the system.”

Hexagon is extremely focused on driving smart solutions for their customer’s productivity. They plan on continuing to gather and analyze data that will help speed up customers’ business and manufacturing processes, while maintaining high-quality products and support.