For the past 12 years, Severn Manufacturing Systems has been specialising in the refurbishment and resale of secondhand sheet metalworking machines from German manufacturer Trumpf. The machines – which handle everything from laser cutting and punching, to tube cutting and bending – are sold under guarantee to a growing UK client base.

For Severn, having the right IT systems in place to support its operations is critical. Its control of just-in-time parts ordering, and after-sales servicing and support, calls for high levels of co-ordination. Get that wrong, says managing director Dave McNally, and you not only have unhappy customers, but also escalating costs – which is why he has turned to Tesseract’s Service Centre 4.2 browser-based service management solution.

“We’ve previously been running manual systems, which limits what you can do. With Tesseract, we have the means to trace the history of all the products we sell, and to track and order all of the 75,000 replacement machine parts we deal with.

“Also, we can see how much we are spending on labour and parts on our overhauls – and, with Tesseract, manage this in two currencies.

“What we have now is a system that will allow us to control costs, and enhance and expand the service side of the business. At the same time, we can extract key data and management reports.”

Rather than purchasing Service Centre outright, Severn opted for it to be hosted by Tesseract. “We don’t have an IT-specific person here,” states Dave McNally, “so the hosting option was very appealing – it has effectively eliminated any worries we might have had about supporting the software because Tesseract takes care of that issue in its entirety.

“Another major selling point for the system is the fact that it is browser-based. We needed our service engineers to be able to remotely access the service system, and now they can use a laptop, or even a customer’s PC to log in - which means we know instantly the progress on any transaction or situation.”

The company plans to introduce signature-sensitive PDAs for the service engineers so that reports, for example, can be signed and verified by the client at the point of service delivery.

“Basically, Tesseract has given us all we might want from a SAP system, but without anything remotely like the expenditure.”