The Customer Services team has been hard at work over the past five years to roll out a new portfolio that includes 40 services to provide customers with a standard offering from Sandvik, with a focus on continually improving the reliability of the equipment.

Before, the level of competency at the company’s 150 service locations varied. Now Sandvik employees are being trained in the most vital areas, making their knowledge much more relevant to customers.

“We have global customers with operations in different locations,” says Dan Allan, president of product area Customer Services. “They want to depend not just on the best services, but getting the services that they need regardless of where they are. These products and services all have to do with giving customers peace of mind when choosing our equipment.”

The idea behind this menu of services is to address the needs of all customers by offering them choice. Not all customers will need every service, Allan says, but they will be able to select the services they do require, allowing them to tailor the support.

“The combination of a services offering that can be tailored to virtually any customer need, and a commitment to the consistent availability of these services regardless of location, is important to any customer,” Allan says.

“For large international customers with sites in many countries, it is important for them to be able to count on the availability of services in various locations,” he says. “For an individual site, the ability to customize or tailor the support from Sandvik based on a broad menu of services makes it easy for them to adjust the support they need for their operation at any specific time.”

This menu of options is also important because it informs customers of the services that Sandvik offers in the event that their needs change. If a customer needs operational advice, then the service portfolio will show that Sandvik can offer this type of support, even if the customer has not used it in the past.

“We are trying to make our services more transparent to customers so that they’re not wondering what we can do for them,” Allan says. “It is about going above and beyond the delivery of equipment. It allows us to bring more to a piece of equipment and help it perform better in the customer’s hands.”

All these new services are meant to complement Sandvik’s long-time service offerings, including its global parts network and technical services desk.

The company’s parts network has seven strategically located global hubs, which offer customers the best availability on components close to where the customers operate. This way, Allan says, Sandvik can “serve our customers the next day, and provide reliable and timely delivery of shipments to customers in every part of the world.”

The company also offers global technical services, which include field services and rebuild services. In addition, it offers asset agreements, which allow Sandvik to directly support a customer’s fleet of equipment with maintenance plans, people, studies, training and the physical deployment of experts when there’s a problem. The idea is to ensure the highest effective availability of the equipment over its lifetime.

Sandvik is making major efforts to combat a chronic shortage of experts with the right technical skills by trying to offer technology that will provide customers with information that will help pre-empt problems rather than having to rely on people to solve the problem.

“We are moving closer to providing real-time information to customers to enable them to make decisions not just on the condition of their equipment, but also on the performance of their operations,” Allan says.

With real-time information the customer can decide to move equipment to ensure there is no loss of productivity.

“What we’ve found is that when we collect the right information, it can help customers make decisions today and help their production today, rather than looking at it retroactively,” Allan says. “Ultimately, this way we can help customers make decisions that are best for production issues at the mine, as well as the lifetime of the machine being used.”