Topcon Customer Story

Located in Oakland, NJ, Topcon Medical Systems, a part of Topcon America Corporation, engineers, manufactures, distributes and supports diagnostic equipment for the ophthalmic industry. With a legacy of innovation since 1970, it has developed advanced technologies that are used by private doctors, clinics and hospitals across North and South America. Topcon provides service for roughly 8,000 unique locations with a product master containing just about 200,000 serialised items. If there’s ever a problem or question regarding an instrument out in the field, an initial call comes into the help desk staffed by about 30 engineers. If the issue can’t be resolved at first contact, one of 5 field engineers is dispatched to the location. Some repairs can be done onsite, but in some instances, the instrument may have to be shipped back to them for depot repair.

Making the move to digitise your field service operations is challenging for any business. Topcon knew that its service organisation had the potential to gain top line revenue, but it needed to elevate the level of support it provided to its customers and really anticipate their needs. “We were buried in paperwork, manual processes, and we were stuck with a legacy client server app,” said Mr. Yantsos. “We also had a hard time determining service entitlements so we were essentially giving away free service. ” Topcon determined that there must be a way to lower administrative costs, drive large efficiency gains and potentially increase service revenues and SLAs. “So as uncomfortable as it was for some to change, it was time for us to consider a fundamental shift in the way that we provide service,” said Yantsos.

To better address these and other problems, Topcon turned to ServiceMax to automate their field service operation. “ServiceMax was the clear winner for us because it’s one of the few products that represents a comprehensive service framework and we had the ability to tune it to make it relevant to our business,” said Yantsos. Leveraging the ServiceMax Infinity Framework and Service Flow Manager tool, Topcon was able to set up the application to meet its business needs. Mr. Yantsos likes that, “ServiceMax is a product that has a powerful business process modelling tool built in. It allows you to make the software match a desired business process instead of being stuck in the box like those legacy client-server applications.”

Another part of the application that Topcon uses to automate field service is the ServiceMax Dispatch Console. According to Yantsos, “This is a product that’s got an incredible field service dispatch console built in. There are tools built inside this product that allow you to do workforce optimisation.” Topcon found ServiceMax to be a solution that can be easily integrated with other systems and support its vision of the 360 degree view of the customer. It has changed how it manages service. “We’ve given our team access to additional mobile tools coupled with ServiceMax so that when they’re done with a repair, they can look at a 20 miles radius around them see that there’s an account where a service contract is going to expire this month,” shared Mr. Yantsos.

With ServiceMax, Topcon can now seamlessly manage and track customer cases from the call centre, through depot repair or out to the customer site in one system. At any time the service organisation, as well as sales, has a view into what is happening with customers. Yantsos stated, “I’m happy to say that we’ve been using ServiceMax for over 3 years to run our entire service organisation. We’ve developed integrations with our ERP and optimised it to ensure that all of our products and parts are tracked. And we’ve seen significant productivity gains.”

The business results are nothing less than astounding. By getting in front of issues before they occur, Topcon has seen a 10% increase in service revenue and a 30% increase in productivity. “We’re able to get in front of warranty expiries and service contracts and determine how profitable they are,” said Yantsos. “We can track cases from the call centre, through depot repair or out to the customer site in a single unified system, decreasing our cycle times.” Topcon also found that ServiceMax Mobile for iPad allows it to consolidate manuals, schematics and all of the information required to perform its jobs—getting customers up and running more quickly than it was prior to ServiceMax. Yantsos shared, “With these results some other interesting transformational things started to happen. This ’holistic adoption’ started to occur where Service started to share information with Engineering and Sales, Marketing began to take advantage of the system to gain insights on potential leads and real collaboration is taking place.”