The Entytle Executive Advisory Board met in Chicago on 12th Oct 2023. The board discussed several strategic topics that included successes with aftermarket growth, challenges faced in the industrial landscape, and the future of Aftermarket and its evolution. Below is the summary of the discussions for our readers:
Entytle Executive Advisory Board Meeting 2023 – Key Takeaways
What is creating success for Industrials?
Like most successful companies in all industries, OEMs find success by embracing digital transformation with technology investments and defining other value-added services for their customers to best serve them.
- Digital Transformation: shift towards digital asset managed services, implementing new tools to create data-driven decisions at scale and utilizing technology to automate workflows
- Service strategy: increasing remote capabilities, expanding portfolio offerings, investing in technology service teams, broadening the skill set of service teams to meet growing customer needs
- Marketing initiatives: data-driven marketing approach using available customer installed base information
- Becoming easier to do business through orders, deliveries, returns, payments, and support lines.
What challenges are you facing?
Not to our surprise, OEMs still are challenged by hiring and retaining workforce, living in ‘reactive’ mode, and others as well. Personnel and skill shortages were the common themes of the discussion. Here is a closer look at the points discussed:
- Personnel shortages: Finding and retaining the right people continues to be an issue, resource-constrained across the board, and the need to retrain after losing employees
- Supply Chain: OEMs working to diversify and mitigate interruptions and delays due to Supply chain interruptions
- IT Agility: Requirements of internal stakeholders and customers are not being met quickly enough resulting in a lost opportunity. IT is overstretched and under-resourced.
- Position to sell aftermarket: Living in a reactive mode. Not everyone is built to sell proactively
- Executing invested technology: Sales teams not utilizing the value of the technology and using it to Follow up on leads provided.
How will the Aftermarket evolve?
The Executive Advisory Board members presented their thoughts on the evolution of the Aftermarket for their respective organizations. The conversation was driven by the adoption of AI and other Digital tools to improve Customer experience. They also agreed on the value that Entytle provides in accelerating aftermarket evolution.
- AI: Going to be leveraged in many different ways- predictive maintenance, supply chain, pricing, make sense of large data models, Gen AI to make prescriptions
- Digitizing customer experience: opening new channels with customers (portals, e-commerce, payment systems), building customer 360, utilizing digital systems for asset performance, incorporating all workflows into one system customers are focusing on investing in
- Additional service models: Creating new service models and offerings that deliver predictability and consistency to drive recurring revenue and customer loyalty. Transforming service business for OEMs to take control over demands that the local service shop cannot handle
The Entytle’s Executive Advisory Board was a hugely successful event that helped both us and the participating members. The insights from the discussions were extraordinarily valuable and helpful to all involved.