Corporate Overview
Pitney Bowes is a global technology company that creates innovative products and solutions for over 1.5 million clients in the world of commerce. Though they are most known for postage meters and other mailing equipment and services, they have expanded into global e-commerce, software, and other technologies. Overall, they partner with clients to support industries including customer information management, location intelligence, customer engagement, shipping and mailing, and global ecommerce. Pitney Bowes has around 600 technicians across the US, Canada, UK & ROI, Germany, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland, New Zealand, with plans to include Japan, Italy, India, and Australia. PB believes it’s vital to have an empowered, educated, excellent field service technician on-site with their customers. Field service is a critical organization for Pitney Bowes. It is instrumental in client retention. In many cases, the field service person is the only face of the organization, the only one who is on-site with the customer. It is up to that team to make sure they are cementing existing relationships and growing the business. The importance of field service is what led Pitney Bowes to ServiceMax in 2011.
Customer Quick Facts
Company:
Pitney Bowes
Industry:
Information Technology and Services
Size:
10,001+ employees
Headquarters:
Stamford, CT
Website:
https://www.pitneybowes.com
“We have a very healthy partnership. I’ve found ServiceMax to be responsive and on the ball, forward-thinking in the roadmaps that they’re devising. And very often we see the earlier conversations that we’ve had emerge in those roadmaps. We’re very happy about that.”
Randy Tolleson, Director of Global Technology and Optimization, Pitney Bowes
Challenge
Pitney Bowes sees significant impact from the connection between their technicians and customers. Tolleson shares, “any industry that deals with the physical world often results in the need for a technician to be physically on-site. It’s extremely important to send a human being, to have that human touch, despite all the technology.” In order to make the most out of that experience, Pitney wanted to make sure their technicians have visibility into customer and part information they need while on site.
Another important challenge Pitney Bowes was focused on was aligning their processes. “We had disparate system globally for the various ticketing systems and systems that ran the company,” explains Tolleson. They had also acquired other companies who eventually needed to be brought on to their system. Pitney Bowes was looking for a way to create a unified CRM.
Solution
When searching for a solution, Pitney Bowes had many requirements. “The key goals and measures of success for the selection of a vendor were around the cost of actually putting these technicians in front of clients and improving on that cost structure. Also, the ability for the technicians to report their parts very accurately, and for us to have some clean understanding of how their parts consumption.” ServiceMax met these requirements, plus others which included a predictable release schedule and a strong performance in the Gartner Magic Quadrant.
Pitney chose ServiceMax and launched the product in 2012 in the Nordics. Today, they utilize iPhones in North America and iPads in Europe. One way they’re using ServiceMax is for the engagement of parts, which involves the search and consumption of parts.
Results
“Our intent was to have the best practice standardized and implemented globally to get the best cost and best service for our client,” Tolleson exclaims. Since implementing ServiceMax, Pitney Bowes has seen some incredible results. Within two years, they lowered their inventory by $4.7M and their freight expenditure by $250K.
In 18 months, there was a 52% reduction in back orders. And after one year, Pitney reduced their revenue leakage by $800K.
Besides the incredible stats, ServiceMax has a positive impact on Pitney’s team of technicians. These service techs understand how to work with the data, as well as how important it is to the business. “They understand the profit motive and the importance of controlling cost and increasing revenues. And they recognize that this tool is providing what we need to do that.”
Pitney Bowes has been an avid user of ServiceMax’s field service management software and has realigned its processes to see incredible results.