Unprecedented business environment is creating new challenges for companies across the world, shrinking sales and margins, leading companies to look for alternate ways to increase revenues to protect shareholders` interests. As a consequence, aftermarket is becoming an important source of revenue for many companies. Aftermarket revenue contribution to companies varies between 30-50 per cent. - Aftermarket is also highly profitable, as the gross margins may vary between 35-50 per cent. An effective aftermarket service strategy requires companies to define on-site and off-site repair and replace procedures, approvals and service completion. Companies face many challenges in executing an effective aftermarket services strategy. Some of them are:

• Allocation and management of field resources / on-site resources.
• Ensuring high first call effectiveness..
• Comprehensive complaint to closure management..
• Tracking on-field and at-site service progress and comprehensive status management..
• Adhering to committed response time, resolution time and other metrics..
• Tracking complete service history, rework and utilisation (Field Service Management)..

Then, many companies face an incomplete customer experience and inconsistent support by geographically dispersed teams, with respect to customers` engagement. There is the need to manage multiple levels of services and risks; design work standards across shifts so as to provide consistent customer experience; base the work management on employee capability and experience; respond quickly to customer requests and eliminate human errors, monitor service technicians? performance and practice incentives management.

No aftermarket strategy can work without adequate planning and involvement of the complete product and supply chain. Companies need to build processes and systems that help their vendor plan and stock the parts required or dispatch them in the agreed timeframe.

Companies without a comprehensive after-market system are facing many challenges. Some of them are:

• Difficulty in comprehensively managing parts, services and sales.
• Inability to ensure availability of parts and service levels across all dealers.
• Ensuring adherence to standard sales and service process across all customer touch points.
• Managing various types of warranty (standard extended, goodwill), monitor failed partsand MTBF.
• Difficulty in managing various types of services (free, mandated) and billing (non-sales, sales, support).
• Lack of a comprehensive system to manage service agreements for various customers.
• Lack of systems to capture complete field machine population its status (running, not working, under repair, etc), and hence rental revenue leakages. Remanufacturing is an integral component of aftermarket strategy. However, many companies face the following challenges:
• Lack of comprehensive remanufacturing solution capturing parts procurement, parts handling and workshop management.
• Subjective?CORE? BOM estimates.
• Lack of a comprehensive system to estimate CORE, assess mandatory and optional replacements, suggest dismantling sequence, etc.
• Comprehensive production module with disassembly and assembly sequence, test and certification sequence, spare parts association, resource requirement and project scheduling.
• Stocking of extracted parts, assemblies and associated inventory management.

Quest Informatics, established in the year 2000, is an industry leader providing high quality aftermarket software products, solutions and services.

Quest Informatics-offers customised software development and parts information services (3D user manuals, parts help desk and catalogues development). Quest Informatics has deployed enterprise scale products meeting global standards at various client organisations.

Quest Informatics FSM not only allows companies to appropriately schedule based on task and resource availability, but also to monitor progress and manage spare parts inventory effectively. The FSM web portal brings all relating information together. With this, customers can log their complaints and view status online. FSM is a user friendly application which provides visibility of all service requests and ensures accuracy of data. Users are provided with an option to customise appearance.FSM can be integrated with other systems for easy and quick data transfer, thereby reducing manual errors.

Support Desk (helpdesk) helps in registering customer complaints through multiple options, viz, phone, SMS, email or Web portal. Support Desk can be configurable with work flow management for various branch/division without any additional investment. Support Desk has an inbuilt system intelligence to suggest solutions for complaints and creates regular updates to all stake holders via SMS and e-mail.

Quest Informatics Aftermarket ERP is an enterprise class comprehensive system consisting of parts, sales and service modules. It can be easily configured for any company structures, whether OEM, OEM and dealer or OEM, dealer and dealer network. The aftermarket ERP offers a hassle-free multi-transactional view of order to delivery. The aftermarket ERP comes with SMS option, can easily integrate with legacy system and has an inbuilt intelligence tools to suggest auto allocation and warranty management. It also offers pre-defined reports including MIS reports, daily, weekly and monthly tracking reports, deviation reports, etc.

The service team consistently reduces the cost of operations by eliminating costly errors, unwanted parts, reduction of inventory and right cataloguing process. As a pioneer in innovative solutions, they have vast experience in designing and delivering mission critical offerings that include BI, enterprise portals, enterprise quality and project management. An ISO 9001:2008 & an ISO 14001:2004 certified company, Quest Informatics has adopted CMM Level compatible processes that ensure its commitment to highest quality and best security.

BENEFITS
Improved efficiency boosting company profitability.
Effective and easy management of service across locations.
Significantly improved customer satisfaction leading to positive customer word of mouth.
Reduction in waste, rework and very high improvement on first call effectiveness.

QUEST PRODUCT PORTFOLIO
Aftermarket ERP
Field Service Management Support Desk System
Remanufacturing Management System
Float Management System
Rental And Re-marketing
Warranty Management System
CSA (Customer Service Agreement)
CRM (Customer Relationship Management)
Vendor Management