Entercoms India, a wholly owned subsidiary of Entercoms USA, provides managed services and actionable recommendations through business-driven IP and analytical models, domain expertise, operations support services and cross-industry best practices. The company’s customised solutions help global OEMs plan their inventory, maximize revenue and drive greater control over business outcomes.
“We enable our customer to be more proactive in their services, make them more responsive to the needs of their customers and help them plan their Aftermarket so that the KPI’s are achieved efficiently and effectively. Over the last 9 years we have also consistently delivered improvements to the critical drivers of our customers’ service businesses and accelerated their business outcomes, helping them save on revenue leakage,” explained Mr. Vasu Ramanujam, Sr. Director – Business Development, Entercoms.
Inception and transformation
What started as a software product development company in 2004, turned into a managed service provider by 2008. “Since our inclination and expertise was in supply chain management, we built products to help clients manage their supply chain and that too in the Aftermarket. Customers ranging from energy, automotive, electronics, oil & gas, in fact any company that has to maintain a network of spare parts to service their customers is potentially our customer,” informed Mr. Ramanujam.
“At first, Entercoms built a software product for a software company based out of Atlanta in a joint development mode. Once a couple of versions of this product were delivered, the customer wanted us to help them implement the product for their customers so we became their implementation partner. We did this for almost 20 customers worldwide in domains such as Automotive, Aerospace, Air-conditioning, Elevators, etc. Then, the customer made us their value-added reseller for India. Through this partnership, we had a lot of learnings that helped us understand Aftermarket in great detail”, he recalled.
Amongst the first learnings was that the Aftermarket people always are remembered last, probably only when the vehicle is off road (as an example in the Automotive domain). Also, most of the times they have to deal with bad data entered through the various stages of designing, production and delivery of the product. “We realized that merely developing, selling and implementing software does not help. We also need to help them achieve their KPIs. We evolved into a managed services organization for this reason – to help the Aftermarket folks get access to clean data, analyse this data using industry standard algorithms and techniques, and generate actionable insights and recommendations that help them achieve their KPIs. In other words, we became the extended arm of our customers’ supply chain team,” he revealed.
Winning the customer
Entercoms first conducts a workshop with the customer, ideally at the customer’s premises. The workshop may range from a week to 2 months, depending on the solution the customer is looking at. All the stake holders from the customer’s side like production, marketing, Aftermarket and IT are involved during the workshop.
The Project team from Entercoms looks at the client’s current data. They interview the stake holders right from the CEO to the folks in Aftermarket, Sales and Marketing and Dealers if possible to understand their issues and needs. The third step is to understand the client’s medium to long term plan. “After this deep dive exercise, we are able to give the client a proposal and work towards a customized programme that helps them achieve exactly what they want. Our goal is to deliver to the target. Software and recommendations are simply tools, the means, not the end,” stated the Director.
Mr. Ramanujam is correct. In most of the industry events everybody mostly speaks about design, production and supply chain, but not about the Aftermarket. “What works for production does not necessarily work for the Aftermarket. For production, it is Just in Time, but for Aftermarket it is Just in Case,” said Ramanujam. A typical production guy would know how many vehicles he will need to roll out in a month and for that, what inventory would he require. However, a workshop guy doesn’t know how many vehicles will come to his workshop, what issues they come in with, and what parts will be needed to fix those issues. Nevertheless, the customer will insist that he gets the vehicle back the same day! So how does an aftermarket guy know what parts should he stock? When the industry moves from BS-III to BS-IV the factory starts manufacturing to the new emission norms, but what about the Aftermarket? He further asserted: “In our country, where we run vehicles for 10-15 years, the Aftermarket person must track various models. It adds complexity to the Aftermarket. Entercoms’ expertise lies in recommending what to keep, where to keep, when to keep, how much to keep. In other words the right part, at the right place, at the right time, in the right quantity.”
Partners in progress
Entercoms has partnered with GE Digital as an Independent Software Vendor on GE’s Industrial Internet Platform, Predix. Entercoms has also partnered with SIEMENS to help their customers get the benefit of insights from the Aftermarket back to Design when they use SIEMENS’ PLM tools.
Case study
Citing an example of predictive and diagnostic failure analytics, Mr. Ramanujam recalled: “A global manufacturer of diesel- and natural gas-powered engines began observing issues with engines produced 4 years earlier which led to continuous ‘firefighting’ to serve new failures and high uncertainty in spares planning and warranty reserve decision-making. They wanted to proactively anticipate the issues across their installed base and have efficient end to end traceability for root cause.”
He continued: “We created an early failure detection program and delivered granular forensic analytics, providing quality failures by model, platform, age and end use. We then integrated visibility of installed base characterization, observed failures and future likelihood of failure and automated alerts to appropriate quality manager or reliability engineer. We also enabled a closed-loop information system by using failure root causes to inform design, and using predictive failure analytics to reduce uncertainty for spares planning and warranty reserves. After we did the analysis they realized that the problem was not with the engine but with the bought-out engine parts. Hence, they could route the replacement to the vendor and save their bleeding revenue.”
Campus connect
Since Entercoms is offering unique solutions, that will become even more complicated in the age of Internet of Things and Big Data, they are funding post-doctoral research in the area of Optimization under Uncertainty to research and devise new methods of saving money for their clients. “So far, with our Managed Services offerings, we don’t have direct competition anywhere in the world. But since there are lot of disruptors in each and every field, by funding research in reputed universities of the world we are trying to make the entry level barrier a little higher for anyone who wants to offer similar services,” he concluded.