At a glance
- Customer: Advanced Technology Services (ATS), Peoria, Illinois
- Challenge: Speed up new customer onboarding to reduce costs and give customers value sooner
- Technology: Kinetic Request portal and Kinetic Task automation engine
- Results reported by ATS:
- 80 percent of the new customer onboarding process automated, using 22 service templates built around common customer needs
- Time and cost of bringing on a new customer reduced by 90 percent
- Time to stand up a new customer onboarding portal cut from four to five business days to a few hours
Making manufacturers more competitive
Advanced Technology Services (ATS) helps manufacturing companies improve productivity and profitability through three divisions: Factory Maintenance Service, Industrial Parts Services & Calibration, and Information Technology Services. Founded in 1985 and headquartered in Peoria, Illinois, ATS employs about 3,000 people in the U.S., Mexico and the United Kingdom.
ATS tailors its services to each customer and tracks metrics to keep improving them. Its results show up as better machine availability, lower inventory and faster IT service delivery for the manufacturers it serves.
Growing pains in onboarding
As manufacturers outsourced more maintenance, calibration and IT work to ATS, the business grew. So did the cost of onboarding. Each new customer got a customized onboarding process that was slow and expensive, and that limited how quickly ATS could get new customers started.
ATS reviewed its onboarding process looking for ways to speed up tasks and get customers to value sooner, so the company could grow quickly without costs growing with it. The answer was an enterprise request management (ERM) system that would simplify service requests and automate the work behind them.
“We needed a system we could use internally, but also provide it as a service to our customers,” says Christopher (CJ) Voss, manager of IT application development at ATS.
After evaluating options, ATS chose Kinetic Request and the Kinetic Task workflow automation engine for its new service request front end.
“These tools not only enabled us to automate and accelerate our onboarding process, they are flexible enough to meet the service request needs of our customers, who range from small and mid-sized businesses to large enterprises.”
The results
Working with Kinetic Data’s team, ATS identified the needs most customers share and built 22 service templates to cover them. Those templates automate 80 percent of the onboarding process.
ATS calculates that the system has cut the time and cost of onboarding a new customer by 90 percent. A new customer onboarding portal now takes a few hours to set up, compared with four to five days before. Employees spend that time elsewhere, and new customers start getting value sooner, which helps ATS win cost-conscious customers.
“Kinetic Request and Kinetic Task are powerful tools that allow us to provide a ‘single pane of glass’ interface. We use the products to augment service delivery and reduce our costs,” says Voss.
He describes working with Kinetic Data as “always been really positive and very collaborative. They’re open to our feedback, and we are seeing ideas that we’ve discussed previously being developed into new product features.”