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A decade ago, leading materials testing system manufacturer Instron was marginally able to
co-ordinate its service, calibration and repair operations using a card-index based system.
Since then, a combination of organic growth and acquisition has led to an explosion in responsibilities. And, admits European Service Manager Philip Nicholson, without the Tesseract’ Service Centre system, his job would be almost impossible today. Not only has Service Centre enabled Instron to cope with this expansion, but there has also been a measurable improvement in service performance and response while the information provided by the system has led to product quality improvements.
US-owned Instron has around 5,000 customers in the UK and has machines installed in about 10,000 sites. With each site having an average of two or three machines - tensile stress, hardness, impact or fatigue testing equipment - the scale of the service administration task is self-evident. The UK team of 23 field service technicians is backed up by in house technical support staff.
As well as planned maintenance, Instron also provides warranty and general breakdown support, UKAS-approved system calibration services and ad hoc maintenance services.
“Our selection of Service Centre was very much based on the system’s call management capability,” says Philip Nicholson, “but we had additional requirements which were initially satisfied by custom-developed software.”
For example:
• Response dates accompanied
by a means of assessing overall performance.
• Service priorities covering installation and commissioning, and warranty,maintenance and general breakdown work.
• Engineers are provided with a forward listing of routine contracted maintenance and calibration call outs which they schedule around other work.
“Also, we wanted to use the maintenance and service function as a means of improving product quality the relevant information that we extract has been a very successful aspect of the application and has positively influenced our quality assurance programme.”
That the Tesseract system has proved a very effective tool for Instron is evidenced by the company’s use of Service Centre also throughout Europe - Instron has offices in Germany, France, Spain, Italy and Belgium - and at the US parent’s operation and within other divisions of the Instron Group of companies.
Instrons computerised service management takes the strain
out of call management!
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