Alcon's Vision for Streamlined Field Services with ServiceMax & ProntoForms

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success story

Founded in 1945, Alcon develops and manufactures innovative medicines and devices to serve the full lifecycle of eye care needs. Alcon's Surgical and Vision Care products touch the lives of more than 260 million people in over 140 countries each year living with conditions like cataracts, glaucoma, retinal disease, and refractive errors.

As the services team at Alcon looked to transform their service business into a profit center, they sought out a single, asset-centric field service management platform that would allow them to meet compliance regulations, standardize and automate manual processes, and equip engineers with the tools needed to deliver the highest level of service possible.

Implementing The Foundation for Becoming a Profit Center
 

Alcon's biggest strategic priority has been to transform the service business from a cost center into a true profit center. To do this, they needed to centralize and standardize processes; develop operational rigor; improve service margins by not giving service away for free; implement remote diagnostics; align sales, marketing, and product development; and position service as a lever to drive sales.

In selecting a field service management platform, Alcon wanted one that was built on Salesforce.com and could provide the flexibility needed to address and support Alcon's dynamic business and provide a 360-degree view for all business functions. After selecting ServiceMax as the best solution to meet their goals, Alcon rolled out the platform to over 600 field service engineers and 100 technical support agents in over 100 countries.

"Our initial implementation in 2014 focused on US, UK, and Canada. We have since rolled out to the greater EMEA, Asia and Latin American markets, completing a global roll out to all regions in 2021, allowing us to standardize processes across the teams," said Keith Olodort, Global Systems Deployment Lead at Alcon.

When implementing ServiceMax, Alcon wanted to drive great technology adoption, business and financial improvements, and to see their field team's experience improve. Adoption was a key metric, and the team kept an eye on how many people were using the ServiceMax platform. The system also introduced visibility into error rates, which allowed them to easily measure the financial impact of ServiceMax. As the field onboarded the platform, error rates that had previously negatively impacted revenue started going down.

To gain the field's perspective, the team made sure to bring the technicians into their change management efforts. "We made sure to share information early and often and gather valuable field feedback. We shared our implementation plan including which features, in which order, and worked to turn the field into advocates so they could sell the solution to their peers. This was an important part of the change management process," noted Olodort.

Adding Advanced Forms Powered by ProntoForms to Automate Out Complexity
 

Prior to implementing ProntoForms, Alcon used smart PDFs that required engineers visit a SharePoint site and select the appropriate service test procedure PDF for the equipment they were working with. Sometimes there were multiple versions and that created the possibility to pull the wrong PDF version and attach it to a case. With Advanced Forms powered by ProntoForms, Alcon can now consistently deploy the correct version for technicians to use.

For the engineers, the time savings are a welcome change. "The biggest savings for our field engineers, in addition to not having to enter the data again because it's all pulled from ServiceMax, is that all of the test tools required for the service test procedure are now automated. These test tools are automatically pulled up when the field engineer starts to fill out the test procedure. This alone is powering a 15-minute per-case savings for the engineer," noted Olodort.

Advanced Forms have also removed timely manual processes around digital signatures and connecting forms to a case. "The integration that we have with ProntoForms and ServiceMax makes it really easy to go through audits with our internal and external auditors because all the data is right there in ServiceMax. ServiceMax and ProntoForms are incredible at dealing with very complex, sophisticated, highly-regulated work and both solutions have been crucial to our success," said Olodort.

Hundreds of Hours Saved with ServiceMax Propels Alcon Forward
 

Today, Alcon has over 2,000 employees using ServiceMax to deliver superior service. They complete an average of 7,500 work orders every month. The Alcon team is now able to automate the entire work order process for field engineers so that they can go and execute effortlessly. This transformation has resulted in huge time savings equating to 900 hours per year through improvements to Alcon ServiceMax, over 1,500 hours per year through improved tracking processes, and 1 minute per case through reducing the number of required Surgery Codes fields. Looking to the future, Alcon is planning to leverage AI and IoT, shift further into proactive and predictive service, and prepare field engineers to use these new technologies.