Survitec Group – Service Operations and Asset Management

The Problem Survitec Group required a solution to manage servicing of its significant global fleet of liferafts, serving thousands of customers, and ensuring legal compliance for its network of service stations. Liferafts must be serviced annually, at authorised service stations, by fully trained and accredited technicians. The challenge was to provide a platform that ensured complete control of these critical safety concerns, while providing complete traceability for the growing fleet of liferafts. Commercially, Survitec sought a system that would secure additional revenue from servicing, certification, technician training, and spare parts, whilst ensuring legal compliance. Like many fast growing businesses, the company’s Service function was over-reliant on paper and legacy IT systems, unfit for purpose in supporting the business as it grew. Off the shelf software had failed to meet the needs of the business, requiring processes to be compromised, resulting in low adoption among users. Over time, the business processes and systems had evolved organically and these required streamlining to remove inefficiencies to meet future growth ambitions. The Solution Flowlens designed, configured and implemented a customer lifecycle management system, based on detailed workshops and analysis of the business needs, end users, and existing processes. The result is a tailored business process, asset servicing and management reporting platform. Servicing and Asset Tracking ensures that Survitec has full traceability of the product as it leaves the factory and across its lifespan. Therefore annual service activity can be tracked, ensuring compliance with testing requirements and ensuring use of authorised spare parts. As the Group acquires new liferaft brands and service stations, these are easily migrated onto the system. Flowlens ensures compliance by tracking the training and accreditation status of technicians, alongside approvals for service stations. As these expire, the platform ensures that technicians are booked onto refresher courses. Failure to stay accredited will result in a lock-out from the system. An online worksheet has also been introduced to streamline the service workflow and capture more valuable data. Survitec can now alert its service station network to the latest compliance and safety procedures regarding its products, which must be observed and acknowledged. Previously this entailed substantial costs for paper documentation, postage and follow-up, which has been all but eliminated. Flowlens powers an Online Audit Worksheet, enabling the Global Audit team to capture and report on Service Station compliance. Management is able to use real-time information to manage compliance and avoid risks. Historically, Survitec sold through distributors and as a result stayed at arms length from the customer or end-user. However, this was no longer viable as the competitive landscape changed. The Flowlens platform enables Survitec to understand and use its customer data and communications, to empower the Sales and Marketing teams to generate new opportunities and revenue. The Benefits Survitec has enjoyed considerable cost reductions, whilst doubling the size of the ‘fleet’ and service network managed. Flowlens ensures legal compliance across the global network, and facilitates quality procedures and the compliance audit trail. Flowlens enables Survitec to track a liferaft from manufacture, through its lifecycle and service history until it is reaches its end-of-life. This end-to-end visibility has generated new commercial opportunities. Before Flowlens, reporting could take days, requesting, collating and processing data manually from across the globe. Dashboards and reports now offer real-time insights and time-savings, including better sales forecasting, upselling and cross-selling opportunities, competitive insights, compliance issues and efficiency gains. As a tailored solution that matches Survitec’s business processes exactly, the Flowlens platform is easy to use, free of clutter, and effective. Due to the Flowlens long term partnership approach, there is a deep understanding of the Survitec Group business. Survitec trusts Flowlens to offer objective solutions to emerging business challenges and combined with the flexible nature of Flowlens, new requirements can be quickly developed and implemented. New initiatives built upon Flowlens include the Survitec Group website and enquiry management system, ‘Global Hire’ Liferaft Hire management system, and Marin-Ark Quality Management System.