Supplier portal unites Trimble’s warranty service participants
Sunnyvale, California-based Trimble is a $3.1B company that integrates GPS, laser, optical and inertial technologies to serve agriculture, engineering and construction, transportation, and wireless communications industries in over 150 countries. Their employees are in over 40 countries, with research and development centers in 15 nations and a global network of dealers and distribution partners to serve and support customers.
Challenge
Trimble needed to unite their warranty service participants. Their 40 years of growth produced a collection of processes and systems that had become cumbersome, complex, fragmented, and manually intensive. This resulted in higher cumulative company cost and functionality, not meeting channel partners’ and customers’ needs.
Backstory: Trimble’s numerous product segments each work uniquely, requiring support for multiple processes. They wanted to provide a single global solution across all product groups for distributors, dealers, and customers to consolidate. A key motivation was identified significant unrealized revenue within service management due to customer data being inconsistent, inaccurate, and scattered among departments and their systems.
Solution
After a thorough industry search, Trimble selected Syncron to provide a Supplier Portal to unite their organization’s Services Operations and automate processes within this single system, with the capability to integrate with their ERP and CRM.
This system simplified new supplier onboarding and ongoing communications with their entire network. This eliminated the numerous emails, Excel files, and faxes, slowing their response time. All communication and information exchange have now been centralized, easily searched, or referenced whenever needed. All stakeholders can see the status of Purchase Orders, Shipments, and Deliveries for real-time tracking.
For universal visibility, the portal provided Supplier Warranty Claims, Parts Returns (RMA), and Quality Dashboards for collaboration to reducing warranty costs and improve product quality. Additionally, OEMs and Suppliers have access to performance metrics, quality analysis, and scorecards to drive improvements in the Supply Chain.
The Syncron Supplier Portal facilitated:
- Registration: Scan with mobile to initiate user registration, integrate with POS, enabling software registration and activation, and upload of documentation files
- Locator: Customers can locate Dealers, Service Centers, and Training Centers as needed
- Service Plans: Opportunity and Renewal Notification for Extended Warranty and Protection plans is automated, increasing opportunistic customer touches to facilitate self-service eCommerce sales
- Knowledge: Fully integrated knowledge/self-help solution for technicians and customers, easily keyword searchable
- Support: One interface for partners, enabling service and support communication
- Quality: Failure codes/symptoms at the Product Line level are made manageable
Result
My Trimble Protected: https://mytrimbleprotected.com/
The Syncron Supplier Portal provided Trimble simplicity for channel partners and customers to register, activate, add service plans, and renew. It allowed for improved tracking of Support and Service interactions. An easy-to-use interface enabled users to enter or manage cases quickly, and the mobile application provided a better experience while on the go.
Trimble’s noted immediate benefits include:
- Increasing Product Registration and Extended Warranty attach rates
- Improving renewal rates
- Enhancing the accuracy of warranty entitlements management
- Providing real-time reporting and metrics tools
Trimble’s Dealer network functionality improved in the following ways:
- Flexibility – The new portal became an additional tool that will help them manage their Support and Service interactions more efficiently in a single location
- Common Authentication – Single sign-on convenience for Trimble software and services
- Ticket Creation – Automated to streamline processes
- Mobile App – Supported on iOS and Android devices, allowed dealers to keep track of DWCR’s and get updates, all within the portal
- Notifications – Made intuitive and flexible, delivered via email and mobile app
- Reporting – Creation and submission capabilities that are flexible and intuitive
- Dashboard – User-intuitive, allowed for easy tracking of case progress