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Background
Customer: Advanced Technology Services (ATS), Peoria, Ill.
Challenge: Accelerate the new customer onboarding process to reduce costs and provide faster time to value. Enabling Technology: Kinetic Request portal and Kinetic Task automation engine Results:
- Automated 80 percent of the new customer onboarding process by creating 22 service templates that addressed common customer needs.
- Reduced the time and cost of bringing a new customer on board by 90 percent.
- Slashed the time required to implement a new customer onboarding portal from four- to-five business days to just a few hours.
Background: Making Global Manufacturers More Competitive
Advanced Technology Services (ATS) helps the world’s most sophisticated manufacturing companies improve productivity and profitability through its three service divisions: Factory Maintenance Service, Industrial Parts Services & Calibration, and Information Technology Services. Founded in 1985 and headquartered in Peoria, Ill., ATS employs approximately 3,000 people across the U.S., Mexico, and the United Kingdom. ATS strives to deliver customized services that provide measurable results for customers. The company tracks metrics and performs analysis to continuously improve the value of its services. Through outcomes such as improved machine availability, reduced inventory or accelerated IT service delivery, ATS makes its manufacturing customers more competitive in global markets.
Meeting the Challenges of Growth
Its success in helping manufacturers improve their results by outsourcing to ATS functions like maintenance, calibration and IT led to new business growth for the company. But along with that growth came growing pains—the onboarding process, customized for each customer, was time-consuming and costly, and it limited the speed at which ATS could get new customers started. The company evaluated its onboarding processes, looking for ways to accelerate tasks and provide new customers with faster time to value, while also enabling ATS to grow rapidly and cost-effectively. The key was to implement an enterprise request management (ERM) system to simplify service requests and automate back-end tasks. “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 investigating options, ATS chose ERM software from Kinetic Data—Kinetic Request portal and 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.”
Delivering Measurable Results
Working with Kinetic Data’s people and tools, ATS identified common customer needs and built out 22 service templates to address those requirements—automating 80 percent of the onboarding process. Since the implementation of the ERM system and the 22 common service templates, ATS calculates it has reduced the time and cost to onboard a new customer by 90 percent. This frees up valuable employee time, provides a faster time to value for customers and eliminates the company’s growing pains. Today, ATS can implement a new customer onboarding portal in just a few hours, compared to the four-to-five days the process formerly required. Its ability to rapidly bring on new customers keeps the company competitive and in a position to continue to attract new, 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. In addition, the process of working with Kinetic Data “has 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.”