Making or Losing Money on Machinery? Trust Data.
Agricultural enterprises know that mechanization is a business imperative, but the cost of maintaining agricultural equipment can be detrimental to business. So, agricultural original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) have their task cut out: on the one hand, they need to subscribe to warranty policies to reduce overheads. On the other, they need to balance policy premiums with the cost of components and field service visits by technicians.
Crux of the problem
Several agricultural OEMs have a warranty policy in place for their equipment. While there is often visibility into the parts that are likely to need repair during the warranty period (thanks to the availability of data), OEMs are often at a loss when it comes to the extended warranty period. So, it turns out, that the cost of replacing a part during the extended warranty period is higher than the cost of the extended coverage itself. This leads to losses of hundreds of thousands of dollars for OEMs.
Solving the Problem
The only thing to do for OEMs is to look at data beyond the warranty period. As fewer companies opt for extended warranty, data around extended warranty is not harvested, and therefore, no insights were available of this period.
Infosys worked with agricultural OEMs to implement data-driven solutions that gained better visibility into the equipment lifecycle of a product by tapping into all possible sources of data, including extended coverage as well as maintenance/service records of dealers. The technology stack created a scalable big data system for real-time data capture, ingestion, and analytics. It integrated product, warranty, telematics, customer, and dealer data. Live data from the ecosystem flows into the Hadoop data lake and data mart environment that stores historical records, providing real-time visibility across the inventory and powering concurrent analytical processes to ensure a business transformation.
The Outcomes
With data-driven solutions, OEMs can expect the following outcomes:
- Financial risk mitigation: The warranty management group accesses data for an objective assessment of risks in product support and the cost of post-warranty service. Such business insights help the OEM generate comprehensive warranty policies that appeal to customers as well as make business sense for the enterprise.
- Inventory management: Inventory tracking improves replenishment by dealers. Moreover, it supports trend analysis and sales forecasting – critical factors for production planning.
- Manufacturing: Our solution correlates inventory data with the condition of machinery. The R&D team uses data to glean insights from events such as the frequency of part failures, patterns of component replacement, and wear-and-tear rates. It facilitates analysis to enhance the mechanical design of agricultural equipment.
