There is a less-heralded revolution that has rippled through the office equipment industry in recent years, one aimed at reducing frustration and miscommunication: tearing down the departmental silos.
While this week’s State of the Industry report continues to assess the technical service landscape, dealers seeking to ensure their service management approach is well aligned with overall goals speaks to the larger picture of eliminating the silos of departmental management that have kept them from attaining their vision.
Goal alignment and open communication have truly enabled Virginia Business Systems (VBS) to make great strides in recent years. From sales and service to logistics, the various departments have input into one another’s goals. As Barry Burress, vice president of operations for the Richmond-based company notes, the shared stake in each segment of the company helps the units stay in lockstep with the overarching goals of VBS.
Like many dealers, VBS found it needed to break free of the siloed approach, where goals and objectives were not clearly and openly shared between departments. The wider perspectives have proven to be a breath of fresh air for the dealer. It’s also bolstered efficiency.
“If our solutions and IT team needs something and they don’t have feet on the ground to do it, service is stepping in to handle that for them,” Burress said. “We’re trying to make people multifaceted so that they can handle different things. The goals themselves, they’re being determined and set by a group, not just an individual or small group of service individuals. We want diversification within the group to give us ideas we might not be considering. Service people, in general, are very analytical and single-minded at times, so having that outside influence and talk track from other leaders within our company has benefitted us greatly.”
Career Paths
At RJ Young of Nashville, Tennessee, executive leadership has challenged its service managers and technicians to diversify the offerings they are able to work on and paved the way for techs to embark on new career paths. Chip Crunk, president and CEO of RJ Young, notes the company is investing in its service workforce, from digital lockers for contactless deliveries to audio/visual and security offerings.
“We want to ensure they can future-proof their skillsets by providing them with opportunities to continue driving value to our customers and our organization,” Crunk said. “We truly believe that our service organization is at the top of the industry in terms of quality, so there is not a challenge where they won’t rise to the occasion to overcome.”
Communication with the service department is of the utmost importance when a dealership onboards new products into the company’s repertoire, points out Erik Crane, president of CPI Technologies in Springfield, Missouri.
“Picking the correct technicians to get trained on new products, along with spreading training opportunities around to all territories and personnel, is very important,” Crane remarked.
There are many challenges to having a diverse product portfolio—technician training, service areas, vendor relations, warranty process and parts procurement, to name a few. But it is a burden that service management teams will need to bear for dealers to help offset losses from underperforming aspects of the business, notes Frank Paulich, vice president of service for EO Johnson Business Technologies of Wausau, Wisconsin.
“We also need to be savvy in how to support workflow applications that are either embedded on the machines or installed in the customer’s environment,” he added.
One-Stop Shop
Given that click revenue may not return to pre-pandemic levels, Gary Harouff believes now is the time to embark on managed services or telecom. The president of Las Vegas-based Advanced Imaging Solutions points out that since clients have devised new ways to run their businesses, it’s imperative for dealers to adopt the one-stop-shop mentality to address the evolved needs.
“This is precisely why we are doing this colossal service realignment right now,” Harouff stressed. “For example, we added an automated thermal temperature scanning device to our product line this year, and we weren’t quite sure which silo would be responsible for this. At first, we designated this product for our IT team, but they couldn’t handle the additional workload and weren’t that interested. Our office equipment team, however, embraced it! We have future leaders inside the company that are sitting right in front of us.”
