The Installed Base is the most valuable asset for manufacturers. Having a good hold on their Installed Base data can create exponential revenue generation opportunities for manufacturers.
More often than not, we come across Industrials who are trying to build Installed Base data mining/management projects internally. They already have many internal initiatives in place, which they believe would help them get a hold of their installed base data.
To understand why building Installed Base Management projects internally fail, let’s first take a closer look at the current state of Industrial Installed Base data–
- Only 11% of OEMs actually know if all of their assets are still in operation today!
- 66.34% of assets don’t have a serial number
- 6.6% don’t have a correct end user
- 26.3% of your complete Installed Base data contains duplicates
- 8.8% of data has missing values.
Manufacturers come across many such installed base data challenges and work towards resolving them. There is no “one” owner of the installed base for industrials. In a recent survey conducted by Blumberg Advisory Group in association with Entytle, 34% of Industrials said their IT is responsible for maintaining and tracking Installed base data while 22% of Service is responsible for it.
Source: Industrial OEM Survey Report 2022
Hence these projects are not necessarily owned by IT alone; many other teams are also a part of such initiatives. CMOs, CTOs, and other executives are also actively involved in building the installed base management projects.
Nevertheless, many installed base management projects end up failing or take forever to generate the desired results.
Here are the top 3 reasons why building an Installed Base Management Project fails for Industrials.
1. The problem of “Bad Data.”
Industrial Installed Base data is stored in multiple formats and spread across various systems. This data is usually not clean and creates a problem of bad, outdated data. While starting any data mining project internally, industrials first need to clean this data, and this can become very overwhelming considering the amount of data that has been collected over the years!
Most Industrial Installed Base data management projects fail due to this problem of bad data. The rule of “Garbage in Garbage out’ stands true in this case. The more bad quality data is fed into your system, the chances of your project failure increase.
Industrials need to put more effort into managing their data quality before building internal installed base management systems. An Industrial Data Quality Engine can help industrials stay on top of their industrial data and aid in the success of their internal initiatives!
2. The problem of Visibility
A lot of stakeholders are involved in building internal installed base management projects. Consider any of your installed base locations – your sales team, field service reps, internal management, and even your distributors or channel partners are involved in managing that location. Having clear visibility of what’s happening in that location, how you can generate more aftermarket revenue, or even understand your customers better to reduce the churn rate is an important step for your internal projects to be successful.
Bad data quality does add to the already existing chaos, but providing clear visibility to everyone involved in managing a particular customer becomes more hectic when everyone is not on the same page.
You need to have a single source of truth for your installed base data. This feature will directly improve your strategic decision-making and help your organization make more reliable data-driven decisions. If your project lacks this feature, you will have different people referencing different versions of your data and inferring different meanings from the same data.
3. A clear vision of ROI
While starting any installed base management project internally, a clear vision of the expected ROI is very important. Aligning your strategy and ROI will keep you away from unrealistic expectations and enhance your chances of success.
The best way to remain focused is to start small. Set small goals initially and gradually scale them up once the project starts to show results. You can then aim for a 3-5% increase in your KPIs and aim to achieve more. If your project doesn’t achieve the desired ROI or benefit your organization, then it is bound to fail.
You can also read: 3 Signs Your Installed Base Data Project isn’t going well…
About Entytle: Entytle helps Industrial OEMs manage their Installed Base Data and helps them drive growth and services. We achieve this using our purpose-built Installed Base Platform that handles data quality, uses Industry-specific algorithms, and provides you a 360-degree view of your Installed Base today. The best part, we do this in 8-12 weeks. So, if your Installed Base project is stuck along the way, give us a shout-out at info@entytle.com.