Finding Your Capacity Sweet Spot: The best way to work with a third-party

What do you do when you need more capacity than you have to carry out after-sales service tasks?

For example, those times when you experience unexpected spikes in demand.

Or when you need engineers to deliver after-sales service projects in a tight timeframe.

Not to mention having to overcome problems of supply chain issues causing bottlenecks and backlogs, which affect capacity planning.

You’re not alone in coming up against capacity problems.

At this point, many OEMs turn to third-party service organisations like Veritek to fill capacity gaps.

In the first instance, they often want third-party engineers to add to their highly experienced and highly trained team.

But the truth is preparing a third-party engineer to provide support for your project takes time and planning.

How to get the most value from a third-party partner

We know the value your service organisation provides. In addition to managing complex projects, your highly trained engineers are responsible for building customer loyalty, generating recurring revenue and identifying opportunities for product improvement.

So, a third-party engineer will unlikely be able to quickly pick up the reigns and integrate into your project team. Moreover, training them to do so is the least cost-effective way of making the most out of your third-party maintenance partner.

To illustrate, let’s look at the pros and cons.

Pros

• A third-party engineer eliminates the need to increase headcount and pay for recruiting, hiring, pensions etc.
• Slotting in a third-party engineer appears to provide the least disruption to your internal systems and processes.

Cons

• You’re going to have to train your third-party’s engineers. Getting your third-party’s engineers to the same level as your in-house team will take time.
• Your in-house team will better understand your products, processes, and culture, making them better equipped to complete complex projects.
• You’re not leveraging your third-party’s business model.

The route to the capacity planning sweet spot

Let’s look at a typical problem we encounter. Most problems share a fundamental theme; insufficient engineers to complete unexpected, time-critical activities at short notice.

To illustrate:

• A service organisation has an urgent backlog of complex machine upgrades.
• The project adds to ‘business as usual’ work, i.e., supporting the installed base of customers’ planned and unplanned needs.
• Moving current resources to the upgrade project will result in missing core KPIs and SLAs.
• Bringing in additional resources will require significant training and start-up time, resulting in missed project deadlines.

So, what is the solution?

At this point, you realise you need a contingency plan.

When contingency planning, we recommend the service organisation take a step back and look at the bigger picture.

The problem is the service organisation has a backlog of complex upgrades.

But the solution can be something other than a third-party engineer completing them.

How a third party can help you find your strategic sweet spot

If you already work with a third-party after-sales service provider, its engineers can provide a safety net and minimise the impact of unexpected projects on your service business.

It is far more efficient and cost-effective to have your third-party ramp up its engineering support to handle tasks fundamental to your after-sales business success, but at the same time, are:

• Predictable
• Repeatable
• Low risk
• Time-consuming

Because, as a service organisation, your third party-partner can incorporate your tasks with similar ones it carries out in your region and sector.

Freedom to focus on core business activities and increase productivity

When appropriately used, a third-party engineering resource becomes an asset when it:

• Minimises the risk of routine tasks essential to customer satisfaction not being completed on time
• Minimises the training required to complete complex projects
• Minimises disruption to your customers
• Minimises dissatisfaction with outsourcing in your workforce

As a result, by using a third-party partner to carry out your predictable, repeatable, low-risk and time-consuming tasks, you can solve your upgrade capacity problem at the lowest risk and the lowest cost.

To sum up

Just because you have a capacity problem in one area doesn’t mean the solution must be there.

To use an analogy. If a senior staff member leaves your organisation, you don’t replace them at the top; you replace them at the ground level.

Because internally promoting staff results in a faster onboarding process as the promoted employee is already familiar with the company’s products, policies, procedures, and systems.

So, it all adds up to this. By working with a third-party provider, you can leverage their expertise and experience to carry out predictable, repeatable, low risk and time-consuming tasks.

Doing so will help you to optimise your capacity planning and find your sweet spot. In other words, you can complete unexpected, time-critical and complex projects at short notice, while at the same time managing costs, maintaining productivity and delivering customer satisfaction.

We’re always interested in having conversations about capacity planning. To find out how a third-party service provider can help you to meet your business demand, do get in touch.

This blog is relevant to the following Veritek industry sector verticals:

Medical
Robotics and cobotics
Print & Graphics
Optometry
Digital Cinema
Photo imaging