In our Asset 360 Summer ’21 release, we are launching features that allow asset-centric organizations to scale the field service business by improving their service teams’ efficiency and work quality.

Key innovations of the Asset 360 Summer ’21 release:

  • A templatized approach to Service Contract and Maintenance Plans
  • Asset Timeline and Asset Hierarchy
  • New Best-Practice Flow: Supplier Warranty Repair
  • Service Process Manager Automation Enhancements

These tools allow your service teams to work faster and create more profitable outcomes, giving you a distinct edge over the competition. Asset 360’s new functionality also enables call center agents, contract managers, and field technicians to better serve your customers—a big part of why customers keep coming back.

[Learn more about Asset 360 Summer ’21 during our ServiceMax Live episode on LinkedIn on Wednesday, July 21 at 9:30 am PT]

Maintenance Plan Template

Preventive maintenance (PM) is essential for the health of an asset, and manufacturers worldwide offer PM plans to their customers. Depending on the number of customers, assets, and plan options, the number of PM plans that a service organization has to execute can balloon quickly. Managing many one-off maintenance plans manually is not the way to scale a business, and it is time consuming and error prone.

Maintenance Plan Template is a new feature that is characterized by its breadth and depth of functionality without making any concessions on ease of use. Instead of creating every maintenance plan individually, customer-facing teams can now use a template when creating an individual maintenance plan. This means it takes way less effort to create plans and accuracy is built in.

Service Contract Plans

One of Asset 360’s focus areas is the development of features that help asset-centric businesses generate a profitable revenue stream through service contracts. The Summer ’21 release introduces a feature that allows service organizations to quickly create individual service contracts by using a templatized approach.

Instead of painstakingly completing every field in a contract by hand each time a contract is sold—and double-checking all the details—contract managers can now use a blueprint. Asset 360 Service Contract Plan automates much of the process and has the added advantage of ensuring that the terms and conditions remain within defined parameters to protect the service margins.

Asset Timeline

This new feature provides a holistic view of past and future activities carried out on an asset. By using Asset Timeline, you can see at a glance how long ago a certain event has occurred, the warranty, and the contract coverage period. There are many other use cases where Asset Timeline proves to be beneficial to service organizations. When talking to a customer about a break-fix work order, call center agents can easily bring forward and schedule an outstanding product upgrade without needing to check other records. Or, upon contract renewal and to prep for customer conversations, contract managers can quickly scan and track the activities during the coverage period to determine renewal attributes.

In short, asset insights drive more successful customer interactions, make users more efficient, and improve decision-making for customer-facing teams, including call center agents, contract managers, quality managers, end customers, and field technicians.

Asset Timeline visual

Asset Timeline is a Lightning Web Component with a high level of interactivity. It is available out of the box and requires no additional configuration. However, if the out-of-the-box configuration does not fit your business needs, creating a new default configuration is easy by using the feature-rich Admin Console. It is also possible to define persona-specific configurations, e.g. one for remote experts and customer care agents. Asset Timeline can also be leveraged by your customers via the customer portal.

Asset Hierarchy

Also new with the Summer ’21 release, Asset 360’s Asset Hierarchy is a way for service organizations to organize and get full visibility into their installed base. It shows the as-maintained status of an asset after it has been sold and installed at the customer site.

To make it easy for service teams to quickly understand the hierarchical asset structure, Asset 360 organizes them in a tree view that is available for assets only, by location and by account. This enables service teams to answer questions like ‘What assets from us are on customer site A?’ and ‘How many assets does Customer B currently have and what’s their contract coverage?’

Our Asset Hierarchy goes beyond just displaying asset data. Users can update asset information as needed and trigger more actions via the Service Process Wizard. It also supports multi-level hierarchies, is fully searchable, and very flexible e.g. screens can be adapted quickly to better meet the needs of specific user groups.

Asset Hierarchy is available out of the box, requires no additional configuration, and can be accessed from any asset or related record. Just as with Asset Timeline, business admins can effortlessly define new default configurations as well as dedicated screens for specific user profiles.

Location-based-Asset-Hierarchy

New Best-Practice Flow: Supplier Warranty Repair

We continue to increase the number of best-practice flows and transactions that Asset 360 provides out of the box. In Summer ’21, we’ve added the workflow ‘Supplier Warranty Repair.’ This new workflow automates the process steps when assets and subcomponents under warranty need to be sent back to the original supplier for repair, refund, or replacement. All too often, defective units are returned to the warehouse, but instead of being sent on to the supplier, they just gather dust. This is where the Supplier-Warranty-Repair flow comes into play. It facilitates returning the components to the supplier for repair and recouping the cost incurred by defective components under warranty. Ultimately, it helps prevent defective components from lying around the shop with no further action taken.

Supplier Warranty Repair visual

Watch our recent ServiceMax Live episode to hear from our product experts about what new features they are most passionate about.

 

ABOUT Katharina Streater

Avatar photoAs the former senior product marketing manager at ServiceMax, Katharina Streater drove the scheduling, contractor management, and analytics capabilities of the ServiceMax platform. Passionate about technology, Katharina had extensive knowledge in analytics, AI, and held several marketing positions over 14 years at OpenText, a leader in Enterprise Information Management solutions. A native of Germany, she deepened the international character of the ServiceMax product marketing team.