Data Analysis & Service Costs

Written by:  Ant Gibson (IT Consultant)
Published:  16 November 2010

When a tough economic climate hits, regular preventative maintenance is often targeted as a means to reduce costs.  Preventative maintenance can be seen as a luxury, and in our industry, we see forklift service deferrals taking place more frequently when the economy dives.  Yet this decision is made without understanding the true cost to the business of the total service picture - including preventative maintenance, breakdowns, customer damage, and lost productivity.

Lost productivity is a very subjective measure, and so it is difficult for us as a service agent to quantify this cost for our customers.  But we are able to assist in delivering transparency to our customers in the analysis of preventative maintenance costs, breakdowns, and damage.

For most, regular servicing is one of life's necessary evils, but we are often too time-constrained to sit down, go through our past invoices, and truly understand what our service costs have been.  To help our customers with this, we have worked with our web developers to provide targeted service data analysis to our customers, in near real-time, right over the web.



The Centra Reporter portal provides our customers with 5 key reports:

1. Open Service Jobs - this report displays all current logged service jobs, regardless of type, and is able to be filtered by date range, plant code, and service job number.
2. Service History - this report displays all completed service jobs, and is able to be filtered by date range, plant code, and service job number.  Two versions of the report exist - one from a financial/invoice perspective, and one from an operational perspective.
3. Customer Damage - we categorise our services into key categories.  One of the most-requested categories is where a service job has arisen as a result of customer damage.  For this report, data is able to be filtered by date range, plant code, and service job number.  The report is targeted at a financial perspective.
4. Customer Damage (graph) - this is a graphical representation of the above report.
5. Fleet List - here we provide a snapshot of the key plant details that exist in our system for our customers.

All reports are able to be exported to csv (able to be opened by Microsoft Excel) or pdf (able to be viewed by Adobe Reader).

If you are an existing customer and wish to be setup with Centra Reporter, click here to access the Reporter page, and click "Register" to send us a setup request.  If you experience any difficulties with this, please email us at support@centrafork.co.nz.

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Copyright:  Centra Forklifts (NZ) Limited 2010.  No part of this article is to be reproduced without written permission.