November 30, 2016

Predictive Maintenance for Heavy Equipment Dealers

Smart technologies are advancing so fast that it can be hard to keep up. ’Big data’ is one of today’s buzzwords, but we filled it up with meaning for our equipment dealer customers. Microsoft’s Cortana Intelligence is a fully managed big data and advanced analytics suite to transform your data into intelligent action. What does it mean for a dealer?

Here is how we use it to make our dealer more effective and to save them money.

Predictive Maintenance for Equipment Dealers

Equipment dealers usually have to watch over thousands – or sometimes even hundreds of thousands – of machines including their own rental fleet and their customers’ pieces of equipment. These machines can cost up to millions of dollars and an unplanned downtime of equipment can incur serious costs for their users or owners.

To prevent this unplanned service, NAXT has a new function that is based on big data, using the sensors on the machines and historic service events to predict the failure of any components which could cause downtime. If there is a probability (based on the data) that a machine is going to break down in the near future, the system notifies the service manager about the event, so that they are able to contact the customer to arrange to bring in the equipment for servicing.

This solution also gives a chance for equipment dealers to optimize the contracts they offer to their customers for the machines – this includes using warranty and maintenance contracts as an insurance for customers to avoid unplanned downtimes.

Cross-Selling

Cross-selling is a marketing term used for the practice of suggesting related products or services to a customer who is considering buying something. NAXT is capable of utilizing the computing power of Microsoft Azure to find relationships between items delivered or sold to past customers without the need of sophisticated and/or complicated setups in the system.

Only a Recommendations API subscription is needed, along with a few clicks, and the system automatically does the rest. So when a customer goes to a parts counter to buy items, the system will notify the parts clerk that he or she should recommend items for the customer. It will also give a filtered list of items which can be offered to the customer, also taking the on-hand inventory into consideration. If the customer accepts the offered items, those can be added to a sales order with one click and the order is ready to be invoiced.