Better Informed With Step-by-step Instructions
In the first part of this series of articles, the practical experience of service technicians impressively showed that organized information is the key to efficiency and a high first-time fix rate. Many service technicians want structured information such as FAQs or step-by-step instructions. This way, you provide your technicians with what they need to do their job.
Why an overview of information is becoming increasingly important
Even though every service call is unique, and every problem presents an exciting new service challenge: Your organization usually already has much of the necessary information and instructions to help solve a task.
However, with the increasing complexity of machines and systems, it is impossible for technicians to know every source of information by heart. Sometimes it helps in this case to call a colleague who knows the machine and every move inside out. But often the technician has to evaluate information from various sources and draw conclusions by himself.
A more efficient approach is via digital platforms, where information on spare parts, tools, repair and maintenance instructions or maintenance already carried out is just a few clicks away. In the best case, service staff can find all the information they need for excellent results in one place.
With such a platform, it is possible, among other things, to provide your service team with intuitive step-by-step instructions. In the following, you will learn about the advantages of such instructions and how your company can also benefit from them.
How do step-by-step instructions make everyday service easier?
Step-by-step instructions are an important tool in various fields, facilitating the operation of software or devices. With clear instructions, even inexperienced users know after a short time which clicks or actions are necessary to achieve a desired result.
Step-by-step guides are also an effective self-help aid for complex industrial machinery and equipment. The guides offer numerous advantages for service technicians:
- Interactive instructions ensure a high and consistent level of service and make it possible to standardize workflows.
- They reduce the research effort for technicians.
- They ensure that even inexperienced technicians can complete many tasks independently and carry out their first assignments at the customer's site more quickly.
- A precise representation of assembly or installation steps creates clarity and structure.
- If each step is defined and traceable, this reduces the risk of errors.
- If the basic steps of a process are clear, service technicians can invest more time in solving problems for which there are no step-by-step instructions (yet).
- With step-by-step instructions, technicians can fix many problems faster, reducing downtime for your customers.
In addition, detailed instructions are also helpful for your customers. Many problems can be solved remotely if your service representative can guide the customer's technician step-by-step through simple repair processes. This reduces travel times and costs on the customer side.
Step-by-step instructions can also be combined with technologies such as augmented reality and displayed in context with reality via VR glasses, for example. The technician has both hands free to work and at the same time always keeps an eye on the next work step.
Prerequisites for step-by-step instructions
Detailed guidance requires a comprehensive database that includes information from different areas and sources. The data must also be synchronized centrally and kept up to date. To prevent service technicians from drowning in a flood of information, an intelligent information architecture is also required, which is created via metadata, filter, and search functions, for example.
Quanos InfoTwin offers exactly these prerequisites. Information from your aftersales & service and technical documentation converge in the modular cloud solution. Whether product documentation or spare parts and service information - all data relevant for step-by-step instructions can be synchronized centrally and searched easily.
What is important here is that InfoTwin focuses on specific machines and their individual characteristics. Service technicians thus receive detailed information about specific assets, which eliminates errors and uncertainties.
How to create standardized step-by-step instructions
Various function sets are available in the platform. One of these is the "Service Activities" set. This allows important information about individual service activities to be displayed and filtered, for example, according to properties such as service level.
Particularly exciting for service technicians is the ability to set up standardized step-by-step wizards for performing service activities. This provides internal and external users of the software with valuable support for performing maintenance and for repairs, overhauls, and modifications to assets.
InfoTwin obtains the information for this from the technical documentation, which already contains many valuable instructions. The contents are presented in a guided form as activities via the Service Activities functionality.
This offers the following advantages:
- The activities are presented interactively.
- Particularly important or difficult steps can be marked with warnings.
- Each completed step can be conveniently checked off - this provides orientation on the progress of the service call.
- A history shows who has performed which activity in the past.
The platform also links the data automatically with relevant spare parts information. In this way, the instructions support your service technicians in the run-up to a service call with an overview of
- activities to be carried out,
- the required tools and accessories and
- the spare parts to be ordered.
In this way, the instructions enable optimal preparation and execution of service activities.
Interactive instructions as efficiency drivers
With the Service Activities in Quanos InfoTwin, for the first time it is very easy to automatically create interactive instructions for service technicians from existing data and instructions.
Repairs, maintenance measures and servicing can thus be carried out more efficiently. Instead of wasting a lot of time searching for the right information, service technicians can check off their service calls more quickly and significantly increase the first-time fix rate.
The step-by-step instructions in InfoTwin provide further information, for example on the spare parts required - saving additional time and effort. The guided instructions are clear and easy to understand. That's why they are helpful not only during service work, but also when onboarding new service technicians.
Your customers or their technicians and maintenance staff will also be pleased with the detailed yet easy-to-use instructions: thanks to the instructions, they can carry out many activities themselves and thus save time and money - guaranteeing a high level of customer satisfaction.
