Malvern Panalytical Customer Story

CORPORATE OVERVIEW

Scientists and engineers from industries including pharmaceuticals and building materials use Malvern Panalytical technologies to better understand a variety of materials like proteins and polymers, particle and nanoparticle suspensions and emulsions, to sprays and aerosols, industrial bulk powders, minerals and high concentration slurries. Their tools enable the measurement of various parameters including shape, size, chemical identity, protein charge, and crystallographic structures. An understanding of these properties is vital in predicting how a product will behave during use.

Malvern Panalytical was formed by the merger of the businesses Malvern Instruments Ltd and PANalytical B.V. Field service plays a key role in maintaining high customer satisfaction scores and keeping downtime low on products, which includes important assets like x-ray diffractometers and XRF spectrometers. PANalytical’s strategic ambition was to become a more customer centric organisation. To do this, they turned to ServiceMax to help with their global services.

CUSTOMER QUICK FACTS

Company:
Malvern Panalytical

Industry:
Electrical/Electronic Manufacturing

Size:
1,001-5,000 employees

Headquarters:
Malvern, Worcestershire

Website:
http://www.panalytical.com/

“ServiceMax has helped us in multiple ways as we have transitioned to a more customer centric culture, from standardising global service processes to enabling technicians to share best practices, the system has been integral in driving better results for our customers.”

John Oude Egbrink
Global Customer Support Director

Challenge

“Malvern Panalytical knew they needed to standardise their process for global service and implement metrics for measuring their KPIs. This would be tricky, as Malvern Panalytical had different field service systems across their global locations.

Communication between the technicians in the field and the back office was also a challenge. Techs were often in remote environments such as the Australian outback. “Our engineers needed to be able to work both on and offline, this was critical in providing greater efficiency for how they handle their jobs as they are often working in rural areas with no 3g connection” says Oude Egbrink.

Solution

After an analysis of the field service management market, Malvern Panalytical decided on ServiceMax. Within months, they were live – on time and on budget.

Malvern Panalytical provides their technicians with laptops, where they utilise the ServiceMax’s Dispatch Console, Spare Parts Management, Reporting and Dashboards, and Contract Management. Technicians also use ServiceMax’s on and offline capabilities to communicate to the back office and perform administrative tasks like ordering spare parts and processing invoices.

During the implementation process, Malvern Panalytical took advantage of ServiceMax’s extensive partner network to implement the solution locally. “We worked with Absi and had a great relationship with them, they were very flexible, very knowledgeable as well as being honest and direct – it’s important to have that local knowledge and language resource in my opinion. Absi as an implementation partner quickly picked up what we needed and implemented very fast.”

Results

Now, with one consistent system, the same best service practices exist across more than 30 countries, worldwide. This alignment and standardisation has born great results for their customers’ experience, and helped Malvern Panalytical realise their goal of becoming a truly customer centric organisation. “Our net promoter score has increased 10%, which we are delighted about. In addition, our first-time fix rate has increased on average 2-3% globally. The most profound thing is our total invoicing time has reduced from 12 days down to less than ½ a day, which is very powerful.”

ServiceMax Reporting and Dashboards are also very valuable for Malvern Panalytical, as the customer support department can now measure average response time and see the improvement. “Our customers are demanding high uptime so one of our main ambitions is to put in place systems to minimise downtime through either remote diagnostics or proactive maintenance and we expect ServiceMax to continue to be a key partner in enabling us to deliver this.”