MilliporeSigma Customer Story

Getting a 10,000-foot view of MilliporeSigma’s service operation wasn’t easy, thanks to disconnected databases for the company’s field services organization, systems team, sales, and contracts renewal teams. “Each entity had its own database, and to do any kind of analysis, we’d have to extract information from all of them,” says Stephen McPhee, head of service for the life-sciences company, a unit of Merck. “It could literally take a month to conduct the analysis we needed.”

Stephanie Jackson, the company’s area service manager, had the same experience. “We were all on Lotus Notes, and pulling reports was just about impossible,” Jackson says. “We were often forced to use spreadsheets.” And if she or McPhee needed to know how engineers’ time was being utilized, there was no fast answer — which meant there was no quick response.

Delays in analysis and lack of visibility were also affecting opportunities to capture leads from the service organization. “Lead generation is a critical success factor, day in and day out,” says McPhee. “Our traditional business model is that field service engineers find those opportunities, but we didn’t have a way to monitor how they were doing that — or rewarding them for the type of behavior we wanted to drive.”

To reduce the time it took to analyze data and capture more opportunities to generate revenue, MilliporeSigma chose ServiceMax. “We saw the chance to harmonize our data across all of our geographies,” McPhee says — a key requirement, since the company’s service organization extends to 40 countries. “That way, we could look at service from a profitability standpoint not only within each entity, but also across the markets that we serve.”

The field service KPI dashboard now allows McPhee, Jackson, and their colleagues to see at a glance how well the service operation is performing. “The dashboard and reports are easy to read and user friendly,” Jackson says. “Whereas before it could take us a month to pull together data and analyze, now it’s in real time. We can make sure we’re accurately forecasting results and managing workload appropriately, with instant data.”

Jackson can share dashboards with customers to show them their most important metrics, like first-time fix rates and average response times. “One customer just told me that the dashboard is so useful that they don’t even need monthly reports anymore, since they have real-time data,” Jackson says.

With 1,000 users of ServiceMax, MilliporeSigma service leaders see clear signs that the service organization is more efficient and is driving revenue and customer satisfaction. First-time fix rates are on the rise, McPhee says, which translates into better customer service. Contract attach rates rose from 10 percent to as high as 40 percent after the first year of using ServiceMax, and contract renewal rates are now at 94 percent.

We are able to measure 36 different KPIs in real time and this has moved us from being reactive to proactive. Notably, we believe our Net Promoter Score has increased as a result of this knowledge. Within the service organization, there are thousands of things that can go right or wrong on a daily basis — so we’re always working to perfect the customer experience and make improvements. Our NPS has almost doubled from where we were before, and I believe this is a result of all the different areas of concern that we’ve heard from customers and the actions we’ve taken to improve performance.

Improved metrics and an increase in leads is a clear result of the faster and more streamlined experience at customer sites, says McPhee. “Our engineers are using iPads, and they can see all work orders and order parts. There’s a lot of enablement at their fingertips,” he says. “They can close out work orders on site, without the need to do lots of administrative tasks after the fact. It’s transformed how we view service, and how our customers view our company.”