Customer Success

Improving Business Processes for Aftermarket Parts

“Our dealerships typically talk to us only if things go wrong. We have heard a lot of positive feedback on this new system.”

Summary

Ditch Witch, a large manufacturer of underground construction, excavation and drilling equipment needed a better way to deliver the latest parts, service and maintenance information to dealers. The company employs over 1,500 workers, manufactures over 15 different product lines and generates over 250 million in annual revenue. By deploying Enigma's InService EPC solution the company was able to integrate maintenance manuals and parts catalogs in a single source application, which has increased customer and dealer satisfaction.

Challenges

Ditch Witch designs and manufactures a wide variety of high-quality underground construction equipment, including trenchers, backhoes and skid steer equipment. The company supports almost 200 dealerships and 700 customers worldwide, along with 500 users in-house.

When the company embarked on a search for a new electronic parts catalog vendor, they wanted an application that would enable the following:

In-house catalog production
Single source for all service and parts information
Robust search and indexing functionality of all aftermarket documents, regardless of document type and format
Improved parts kitting and supersession functionality
Better support for PDF (treated the same as all other formats)
Modern architecture, to integrate with existing ERP and back-office applications
Web browser-based solution
Multi-lingual support
Ability to distribute via Web and DVD
Role-based access control
Automated data extraction and conversion from the OEM’s SAP system (maintains catalog with up-to-date parts, service and pricing information)
Integration between catalog and SAP CRM to automate parts order submission for dealers/distributors and customers.

The Solution

In changing its parts catalog system, the company had three goals: 1) to reduce the complexity of producing and distributing its service and parts information, 2) to improve dealer satisfaction, and 3) to increase aftermarket sales. The company selected Enigma InService EPC because the application automates the catalog creation and update process and is based on a modern architecture that enables the company to connect the front-line service catalog with back-office business applications. A key capability for dealer satisfaction was to support fax, email and direct electronic (integrated) parts orders. A distinguishing competitive feature of Enigma InService EPC was that it integrates with the company’s SAP R3 ERP and CRM systems to help customers quickly find and order the correct parts, with complete service, pricing and real-time inventory information.

The OEM chose the Enigma InService EPC solution to assemble and distribute all of its parts and service information, including interactive parts pages, service bulletins, safety notices, technical supplements, operator manuals and marketing materials. The dealer network’s primary access to the parts catalog is via the Web. For those dealers using DVDs, and USB keys, there are several options for incorporating incremental catalog updates.

According to the company’s Manager of Enterprise Applications, “InService EPC saves time and improves efficiency for us and for our dealers. With Enigma, we have the ability to produce our parts catalog in-house, which gives us much more control of our information and the ability to easily generate incremental updates via the Web and DVD. Prior to Enigma, our dealers had to make frequent calls to our customer support office to find which parts they need. Now, we make it easier for our global network of dealers and end-customers to conduct business with us by providing them with the most current information and integrating it with our ERP system.”

The primary benefit for the OEM’s dealerships is to quickly find what they are looking for. “The front end was what sold us on Enigma. From a user perspective, Enigma InService EPC was the best solution among the vendors we compared. The competition was very hodge-podge. Two critical capabilities we wanted were the tree navigation view and the ability to select by category model or search center, which Enigma provides. The speed and flexibility of parts identification makes a big difference. Being able to search all technical documentation regardless of whether it is in PDF format is also important. Our dealers have told us it now takes less time to find service and parts information and the information they receive is more accurate.”

Another business benefit of the Enigma solution is that it allows EPC data to be used for other customer-facing applications. With Enigma’s open architecture, the OEM can now integrate service and parts information with a separate company that acts as a middleman for rental yards. This capability opens up yet another aftermarket sales channel for the OEM.

Enigma InService EPC will also allow Ditch Witch to make its parts catalog available to general customers on the Web, so both dealers and direct customers can have access to service and parts information. “Many of our customers are large contractors or rental fleets that want to be able to self-service as much as possible. They will still process parts orders through authorized dealers and distributors, but they will be able to look up the part and figure out what they need to order, find a dealer, and get it from the dealer more quickly,” said the OEM. The Enigma solution will make Ditch Witch one of the first in the industry to provide detailed parts and service information to general customers. This will increase brand awareness and part sales by drawing another 2,000-4,000 users to the online electronic parts catalog.

Benefits

Single, integrated solution for all OEM technical and marketing information
Delivers real-time information on product pricing and inventory
Search functionality enables simple or advanced searches according to free text, serial number, part number, description, product type, family and model
Allows OEM to update and distribute parts and service information at will
Allows dealers to collect and share feedback with the OEM, using public and group eNotes
Supports multiple delivery environments (Web, DVD, USB key, paper)
Provides incremental update functionality (to keep the EPC current) for DVD and USB key installations
Open architecture supports integration with other aftermarket channels, and with the company’s SAP ERP and CRM platforms.

For more information, please contact infous@enigma.com