Personalized Pathways

Market Trends in the Industrial Manufacturing Industry

High-quality, highly personalized services are a necessity for modern industrial manufacturers.  Employee experience is changing; people need effortless digital experiences on consumer grade levels. Increasingly servitization makes manufacturers insist on investing in intelligent, people-oriented solutions. Amidst a talent crunch, aging infrastructure, and the disruption caused by global markets, manufacturers are emphasizing digital transformation, which can make employees more productive, allow better service delivery, and make operations agile using personalization powered by data.

Challenges

The client faced challenges in their business processes related to more than fifty personas in their company, such as:

• Support challenges : Lack of employee-end-user personalized support in eliminating and automating recurring business process problems.
• Customization constraint : Dearth of critical daily services customization persona-wise for significant ticket resolution reduction.
• Siloed data : Data points, for instance, user motivations and frustrations, weren’t captured that tie to the customer journeys.
• Monitoring gaps : Each year wise, critical processes issues are being identified for individual personas. These issues are monitored to assess their resolution progress and quantify the impact of resolving them on business KPIs

Objectives

1. Foster collaboration between application teams and client teams to decide on future toolkits
2. Establish a clear picture of the current critical personas and compare them year-wise
3. Craft a roadmap to enhance the impact of business KPIs and reduce ticket count while prioritizing the persona experience optimization journey
4. Boosting adoption of digital services to enhance employee experience

Our Solution Paradigm

To deal with the challenges, we  built a service delivery personalization framework. It corresponds each employee persona empathy map in the top three business functions such as aftermarket and service, operations, and sales – a year-over-year opportunity prioritization and value realization. We have enabled design thinking workshops, charted the workflows and journey maps that help clients understand the experience gaps, and identified the areas to enhance engagement and employee experience. The framework consists of five key phases:

• Portfolio analysis : We determined effective process areas through persona-based analytics data, using effective data extraction, system data filtration & sorting and employee persona standardization.
• Opportunity identification : Identified critical personas and their pain points through functional areas of business, by employing the highest issue areas identification, recognised top personas raising most issues , associate employee application touchpoints, and sampling employee personas.
• User-centric solutioning : Defined solutions co-created by using empathy mapping and journey design, with sample persona validation, questionnaire playbook preparation, and persona alignment for empathy map preparation.
• Execution : Implemented cross-functional and targeted interventions, through persona journey validation with the application team, business functional opportunity realization, workshops to map persona opportunity journey, and discovering productivity increase variables.
• Value Realization : Created business impact in digital KPIs and productivity measures by defining and aligning on digital metrics, defining monitoring approaches for the KPIs, and quantifying value articulation.

Strategic service personalization solutioning steps

Approach : Data collection, segmentation, and deep dive into data analysis

Persona identification : Identified top critical personas such as supervisor, sales representatives through business segments and functions to analyze application and process touchpoints

Issue analysis : Identification of top issues of each persona by application owners, analysis, and bifurcation into region-wise and year-wise trend understanding

Empathy mapping : Prepared empathy maps to understand motivations, frustrations, business outcomes and solution intervention required, which helped in increasing persona experience

Persona mapping : Developed persona journey maps with their demographics, business KPIs, day-in-day-out activities, frustrations, issues, and motivations at work identified

Business benefits

• Enhanced business process standardization by optimizing daily monitoring procedures and reducing request processing time
• Work orders, jobs syncing, and generation ticket resolution to the tune of 80% tickets/month for supervisors and sales representatives
• Optimize sales function data syncing and integrating with SAP by 100% tickets/month for supervisors and sales representatives
• Streamlined shipment order process, accuracy and efficiency by 100% tickets/month for technicians and logistics leads
• Optimized contract booking opportunity errors by integrating with the root causes of the repository to display causes of error without support team dependency by 20% for supervisors and sales representatives
• Minimal credit team dependency for account creation and synchronization with the SAP database by configuring the job scheduler batch-wise at timely intervals

Tech Stack

• Microsoft Power BI (analytics and dashboarding)…..analytics and dashboarding
• Miro (collaborative journey mapping)
• Microsoft Teams (virtual collaboration and workshops)
• Salesforce, Oracle JDE, SAP S/4HANA (enterprise system integration)
• MS Excel/Office Suite (data sorting, reporting)
• Custom SQL scripts for data verification
• Job Scheduler tools (for batch automation)

A personalized service delivery goes beyond a technology-driven project, a people-first change unlocks every employee to achieve great business results. The case study demonstrates the benefits of empathy, design thinking, and data in emerging together to redesign industrial processes.

Naushad Khambhawala
Vice President Manufacturing - Americas, LTM

Conclusion

The employee business process persona transformation can be seamlessly achieved by analyzing the issue through service rationalization framework. This transformation process highlights the strength of a persona-based service delivery in mass manufacturing. With the assistance of a custom rationalization model, we not only resolved crucial employee pain points, but we improved on their key enterprise operations, and launched digital KPIs in line with the organization strategy. We successfully achieved the employee opportunity transformations in HVAC business segment, minimizing ticket data and automating business processes to tackle challenges and drive business KPIs for employee persona experience enhancement.

We have brought great benefits of ticket deliveries, user satisfaction and streamlined efficiency in the sales and services as well as operations. Today, roadmap initiatives are underway to continue this same personalization to other geographies and business units. In the long-term, the outlined model will provide a scalable blueprint of smart, human-focused operations that will respond to changing workforce demands and expedite digital transformation at the enterprise level.

Are you looking for a persona-based servitization solutions for your organization? 

Reach out to us at mfg.communications@ltm.com or Interactive.Services@ltm.com