What is Service Lifecycle Management (SLM)?

Service Lifecycle Management (SLM) is crucial for organizations for several reasons:

Maximize asset uptime: Ensuring continued operation of infrastructure, assets and customer systems is essential to ensure customer satisfaction and retention as well as avoiding financial penalties.

Simplifying service: Delivering service successfully is increasingly difficult due to a variety of factors. These include the complexity of intelligent and interconnected resources, the demands of multiple stringent Service Level Agreements (SLAs), the scarcity of skilled personnel, challenges in parts supply and logistics, and rising costs. To deliver a cost-effective service that is consistent, repeatable, compliant, and satisfying to customers, it’s crucial to have a comprehensive understanding of all these aspects.

Extend asset life: To reduce costs and improve sustainability metrics means ensuring the maximum asset lifetime. Optimizing asset performance through IoT monitoring, delivering preventive maintenance and service can help extend asset life and improve asset operating efficiency.

Increase efficiency: To deliver service takes a team. A team from customer service to contracts, product/asset teams, supply chains, engineering and repair, dispatchers and field workers. Access to information across these data silos is needed to coordinate and optimally deliver successful service.

Increase service revenues and margins: For manufacturers facing increasingly tight profit margins, SLM enables these companies to increase service revenue, upsell other services, or product upgrades for their physical assets.

Deliver sustainable service: Demands to deliver service sustainably are increasing from customers and regulators. This will only continue to rise in importance. Reducing truck rolls, increasing repair and refurbishment programs and extending asset life are all benefits of SLM.

The key components needed to succeed in delivering Service Lifecycle Management today:

Customer support: From contact center to self-service portals and mobile apps. Customers and their service agents need a convenient and complete view of the product/asset fleet, contracts, SLAs, existing requests, scheduled visits and a knowledge base of common issues to triage the problem and find the best solution which may be conducted by the customer, remotely or on-site by a skilled technician or crew.

Service request management: To successfully coordinate service requests requires information including the customer, asset location, history and issue, contracts, warranties and SLAs, plus the spare parts and consumables needed. What type of service is required? For instance, installation, removal, break-fix, preventive maintenance, annual service, or inspection - ad hoc or recurring. Under contract or paid for?

Spare parts management: Managing inventory for spare parts and replacement assets often in multiple locations including national and regional warehouses, technician vehicles, customer sites. Aligning storage and asset locations for efficiency and speed of service delivery. Stock replenishment including forecasting based on demand.

Warranty management: Whole assets and components, including replacement parts, may be subject to warranties. Ensuring accurate tracking of warranty claims and repairs is essential to deliver the right service, protect service margins from missed chargebacks, and deliver customer satisfaction.

Service planning and scheduling: This is the organization and coordination of all the resources needed to deliver the service successfully. What skills, certifications and equipment are needed? Are the parts and consumables needed in inventory in a warehouse, on a van, or do they need to be sourced and delivered to the asset site? Which technician or crew have availability, are on-shift and will be in the area where the asset is located? What’s the optimal schedule to successfully deliver the services to your customers with your available team in the most efficient way?

Field Service Management: Managing the technicians and crews in the field. Providing the optimum route to reduce travel times and vehicle emissions to arrive at the customer site at the appointment time. Ensuring the technician has the customer, asset and task information needed to complete the job; from checklists, parts management, the job task list, and recording key measurements to customer interaction, quotations and upselling. Plus managing the unexpected when traffic delays, breakdowns, sickness and urgent requests cause disruption.

Returns, recalls and repair management: Returns from customers or field technicians of assets and components for replacement, repair or refurbishment for warranty, sustainability or cost efficiency is essential for controlling costs and successfully managing inventory.

Automation and AI: To increase process efficiency and employee productivity for service. From intelligently automating workflows to identifying the best engineer, optimizing travel times and appointment slots to determining the highest likelihood of a first-time-fix and improve the speed of service delivery.

Orchestration: Service Lifecycle Management needs to coordinate so many of these areas to successfully deliver service that software should be used to manage the holistic service lifecycle.

Service Lifecycle Management software can be highly complex, and a solution is typically created by integrating different systems that have been acquired by individual teams within an organization. That ‘integration’ will cause delays in information being visible across the different systems, and all too often relies on some manual processes for data exchange. There are obvious compromises with this approach, the key being that you still have silos in your organization caused by these separate systems, reducing visibility, speed and accuracy of service delivery.

It is often best to have all the components needed on a single platform to fully benefit from a single source of data, or one data model. The result is real-time visibility, greater agility with precise service delivery and increased customer satisfaction, while improving both service margins and revenues.

It’s important to thoroughly assess your service lifecycle management needs as an organization, across all the teams that are involved. Those teams can be disconnected from each other and even be unaware how their data and actions affect and can improve service delivery.

Delivering great service takes a connected team. Always assess any software solution against your unique needs. That way, you can ask the question “What is Service Lifecycle Management?” from the point of view of your own organization.