When applying a Machine Health program, a Customer Success Manager is on hand to streamline the onboarding and adoption. As an extension of the maintenance and reliability team, they are there to make sure you’ll be celebrating those wins in weeks not years.
Machine health solutions provide manufacturers the insights to increase efficiencies, drive productivity, and impact the bottom line. But implementing these new solutions is never as simple as flipping a switch. Focusing on planning, onboarding and adoption in the first 90 days is key to making sure your Machine Health program starts off on the right track.
Plan Ahead
When a commercial agreement is in place, we provide our partners with a dedicated customer success manager (CSM). This person will act as an extension of your team and provide coaching and training to help the organization meet their defined Machine Health and performance goals.
The CSM’s job is to quickly understand the short- and long-term goals for the partnership, determine requirements for a site survey, project planning, and prepare to engage the customer as a full partner in the adoption journey — purchasing a machine health solution is great, installing is a huge step in the right direction, but both of these steps mean nothing if the on-site team doesn’t embrace the new technology into their existing workflow.
CSMs help keep Machine Health programs on track to meet the various milestones the plant team sets. They also are there to answer any questions or requests the on-site team has. Augury’s CSMs work with customers in various industries giving them exposure to a broad range of maintenance and reliability teams enabling them to work well with their accounts — no matter the company’s asset management strategy.
Training and Empowering Champions
There is an art and a science to implementing, adopting, and leveraging the benefits of a Machine Health solution; and for manufacturers, their dedicated CSM is their biggest ally.
The first 90 days after the purchase are critical for developing the relationship between CSMs and their accounts. During this time, there are four distinct training tracks that we leverage to onboard and teach the customer how to use the system to enhance their productivity in different types of roles from maintenance, to reliability, to operations and leadership. The CSM works closely with a variety of customer stakeholders to help them understand their baseline and metrics, and to tangibly show them ROI from the beginning.
CSMs ensure successful adoption of machine health technologies and always ask the right questions to their customers. It’s their job to do everything in their power to give the customer the best experience with the team and product. During the onboarding process, customers often also make feature suggestions and CSMs are dedicated to making those a reality whenever possible.
Working as an Extension of the On-site team
Maintenance and Reliability team members are highly skilled professionals. They are in tune with their machines; they know them inside out and in many cases have taken care of them for years. These professionals commonly have high expectations for IIoT solutions and will occasionally demand proof of value before disrupting their current ways of doing business.
These skilled professionals use various techniques, technologies and maintenance and reliability practices to know when something is wrong with their machines. And while most are eager to embrace new technologies, some may not have the time, or the know-how on their own. This is where CSMs come in. It’s their job to make the case to these highly skilled techs — to show them the value and help them understand the many ways that data-driven predictive maintenance and Machine Health insights can augment what they are already doing, and make them even more effective.
These maintenance techs have a variety of pain points that they work hard to address in their daily jobs. Reducing downtime, reducing labor costs, optimizing PMs. Machine Health solutions like Augury are designed to address those pain points, while the customer success team exists to operationalize that pain relief as quickly as possible for customers.
Celebrating Wins, Together
Typically, maintenance and reliability teams get excited after they begin to see the benefits of their new Machine Health program. Nothing is more motivating than using new data to catch and prevent potential catastrophic failures before they happen—and realizing that the data always existed but you can now take advantage of it.
Once site-level stakeholders are trained, empowered, and begin to realize savings on the shop floor, leadership stakeholders quickly see the value of their investment—and typically start looking for expansion opportunities.
Often the organization will look to leverage the savings from the initial installation to implement Machine Health in another part of the facility, which creates more new value, and a compounding return on investment.
But it all starts with a committed CSM and a dedicated on-site team that is ready to innovate and make a difference from the shop floor to the company’s bottom line.
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