The project
Outform is a US-based Digital Signage company that develops modern retail solutions for major companies.
Motorola was Outform’s main client in Brazil and relied on technological retail solutions to strengthen their Brand Presence in stores as a hi-tech company. This means that any issues with the display reduce brand visibility in a highly competitive market.
Outform displays are built to outstand the proof of time and heavy use, but as with any technology it presents minor hardware or software issues that can break the system. Most of the times the problems happened after transportation, electrical surges or updates in digital content.
Outform needed to design a new post-sales service to cover all of its displays in Brazil
Role
Outform Regional Manager in Brazil
My challenge was to plan and prepare all the parts of the new service while safeguarding Outforms IP.
Project
Plan and implement the technical support service in Brazil
Solution
A project with a set of operating rules to cover displays under 36h SLA
Impact
Reduction in service times from 1 month to 3 days.
The restrictions
The plan required coverage of 4 different models and 1100 displays, distributed around 220 cities. Most problems were shared among different models, but parts and solutions might have been different.
It was important to protect Intelectual Property: don’t share documents or instructions that contain relevant information. All maintenance should be done in loco.
At the same time that the SLA was important to Motorola, we should keep maintenance at a low operational cost. We needed to develop a solution to cover a large geographical area under a short time notice.
To reduce the time with the display off, we should have an SLA of up to 3 days, from the first contact to the solution.
This meant we couldn’t send a technician to identify the problem, only to then send specific exchange parts.
The solution
We selected a trustworthy partner that already provided services to Outform. This company functioned as a hub, responsible for setting up a network of partner technicians and centralizing all service requests, training and maintenance.
I mapped all the most common issues and prepared maintenance kits that contained all the most common parts that needed fixing. When a display was problematic we shipped this part to a technician so he could do most fixes without needing to wait for parts.
As part of the technicians were not used to Outform’s displays I prepared a set of videos guides to fix most issues.
For issues that demanded more advanced solutions and were related to Intelectual Property, we requested a display transfer to São Paulo and exchanged the broken unit for a working onde.
Backend
To organize the service Backend a series of maintenance kits were prepared, with the most common parts needed for replacement.
I produced a series of videos to help guide technicians through the most common problem fixes.
When a new problem was identified, the main engineers in China or Israel were informed and worked to provide a solution.
A network of partner technicians was set up close to most of the 220 cities.
If costs were above a certain threshold Motorola would move the display to a closer location and lower transportation.