The planned downtime of a system has long passed, but the maintenance work has still not been completed? Are the Service Technicians on-site missing important parameter information they need, in order to be able to start the system up again?
Non-existent, incomplete or outdated information is a decisive (negative) factor for the Service efficiency of companies. It severely disrupts the workflow of Service teams – with a direct impact on the availability of production equipment.
The good news is that much of the information your teams need in the field already exists – but often in disparate systems, sometimes only in the minds of your Service Engineers. It's long since become a key task for companies to capture this information in the best possible way, to manage it centrally, and to make it available to all employees.
How can this be achieved?
In our Insight-Report-Service 2021 Cooperation Study (available in German, only), we found that for almost half of the respondents, Service information is created directly within the Service department. The advantage is obvious: the expert knowledge of the company's own specialists can be accessed and used immediately.
But what about the methodical and technical implementation? The busy schedules of Service Technicians usually leave little room for updating documentation. Between maintenance orders and business trips, there's just enough time to type up the most important information in a text editor. In the best case, the text document is stored on the company network for co-workers – if they can find the document at all.
It's obvious that this approach offers a lot of room for improvement. What are the biggest pitfalls?
What does this mean for manufacturers? They must prepare themselves for the fact that the need for information in Service will continue to increase in the future. The shortage of skilled workers, the increased use of less experienced lateral hires, and the loss of knowledge (due to generational changes) in working life are the critical factors here. In view of this development, decentralised document management in the traditional sense quickly reaches its limits.
How can all of this be done better? In the field of Technical Communication, the trend is clearly toward platform-based solutions for standardised and centralised content management. In the Service sector in particular, special digital information portals are increasingly establishing themselves, with which the provision of information to Service teams can be optimised in a very targeted manner.
What functions do such information portals offer – and what are their advantages over traditional document management?
Basically, the selection, acquisition and implementation of an information portal for Service are steps that should be thoroughly considered and aligned with the individual framework conditions of the company. In most cases, they go hand-in-hand with a restructuring of information management within the Service organisation. It's therefore important to get the main users (e.g. Service Technicians) on board early enough, and to take their requirements for the new system into account.
It should be noted that the rollout success of a new software tool depends, to a large extent, on the acceptance of users. Here, it's crucial to familiarise the entire Service team with the new options and functions through targeted training. Only in this way can the information portal develop into a real benefit for your company.
New challenges await the Service Technicians: In the future, they'll have to be prepared to feed their valuable expert and detailed knowledge back into the organisation to a greater extent, and to share it in the form of Service content on the portal.
The information portals currently available on the market support this workflow with a clear and intuitive interface that's familiar from common online applications. In addition, existing Service Documentation can be easily transferred to the system. Following the credo of "first things first", the portal is quickly populated with information and your Service people benefit from significantly simplified information access shortly after launch. Subsequently, any remaining information gaps can be identified and gradually filled with new content – thus gradually increasing the content volume in the information portal.
In order to professionalise the creation and management of Service information over the long-term, it can also make sense to rethink the distribution of roles and tasks. For example, responsible individuals are needed to take care of the development and maintenance of the information portal. Ideally, these Information Managers should also be responsible for both editing and producing the new Service content. Their know-how helps to relieve the Technicians of purely editorial tasks and to create Service Documentation that's as comprehensible as possible, and from which every Service employee benefits.
Do you still have questions about the benefits of digital information portals in Service, or would you like to learn more about specific functions? We'd be happy to advise and support you.