- Clearops
The Transformative Power of ClearOps: The AGCO Case Study
Who we worked with
AGCO is a a global leader in the design, manufacture, and distribution of agricultural machinery and precision agricultural technology. Its brands include Fendt, Massey Ferguson, Valtra, Challenger, and many more. In the AGCO Case Study we have consolidated relevant information to achieve aftermarket excellence.
What the Challenges were
AGCO had several burning issues they needed to address. AGCO completely lost visibility over its >2.000 various dealers and distributors, their stocks and sales, as well as their service levels, once the produced equipment and parts had left manufacturing. AGCO was blind when it came to their downstream supply chain, and couldn’t properly plan for production nor analyze and impact customer satisfaction, loyalty and fill-rates.
The lack of system integration between AGCO and its dealers resulted in a massiveamount of manual effort, ranging from part planning to warranty claim management to service fulfillment and general information interchange, resulting in high costs for AGCO and less time spent on customers for dealers. Because of these barriers between AGCO, its dealers, and end consumers, a lot of point-of-sale (PoS) information was missing, making it difficult to diagnose machine problems, acquire insights into customer consumption and loyalty, and understand the competition.
Furthermore, the dealer network’s lack of information and skillsets resulted in low fill rates, leaving customers unsatisfied and dealers and AGCO losing sales. Customer equipment was out of operation for longer than usual, resulting in large downtime costs, unless they were willing to pay for expensive emergency orders. Furthermore, because service facilities lacked consistent servicing schedules, they were reactive rather than proactive when their equipment failed leading to poor service levels.
The Solution
ClearOps developed a powerful planning and collaboration platform that can connect and integrate a heterogeneous supply chain from production to dealers and distributors down to the machine in the field without replacing existing infrastructure, while also providing digital tools to dealerships, distributors, and service facilities to efficiently manage machines, parts, and services.
This AWS-hosted, micro-service system architecture is designed for large-scale dealer integrations, and it connects over 1,750 AGCO dealers from six continents who work on more than 75 ERP systems. For the full solution suite, ClearOps provides real-time interfaces for data integration, data validation, and quality monitoring, as well as automated notifications and system corrections. This allows for seamless operations throughout the ecosystem.
Besides the underlying master data and supersession management, the program also includes:
- Best-in-class forecasting and inventory optimization, as well as customized and completely automated replenishment workflows
- A comprehensive service suite that enables service execution – track opportunities, schedule services, resources, skills, and manage parts
- An Asset management tool that allows predictive service alerts and scheduling avoiding unnecessary machine downtimes
- A transformed process for submitting and validating dealers’ warranty claims
- Advanced reporting and visualization of inventory, services, and asset availability
- for OEMs and dealers across the globe in real time, powered by Amazon QuickSight
With this business-program support and maintenance model, the system is up and
running over 99% of the time.
The Impact
Since we put the program in place, the gap between the dealer-facing fill rate and the customer-facing fill rate has dropped to under 10%. That means the customer-facing fill rate went up from 60-70% to over 85%. This translates to a lot more part sales and a lot fewer lost sales for both dealers and AGCO. Other benefits include:
- Part sales have increased by 15% as a result of better forecasting and inventory management.
- Parts availability has increased from approximately 65% to 86%, reducing repair time by one to two days.
- A 9% reduction in non-moving inventory has lowered working capital requirements by 20%.
- Automating lower-value processes saves dealers two to three hours per week, which they may spend with consumers instead.
- Fewer emergency orders, automated warranty claims, and less manual work, as well as the complete digitization of OEM-Dealer-End Customer processes, not only result in efficiency gains, but also in an extremely valuable data foundation for improving quality, identifying opportunities, and analyzing the market.
AGCO’s commitment to continuously develop the business value of the solution for
dealers has paid off, winning several innovation awards so far.
William Barkawi
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ClearOps GmbH
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info@clearops.com