Wednesday, 14 March 2007 22:25
Organisation and Human Resources Factors within Aftersales Services
After determination of business model to be applied in order to increase the value of company, organisation of aftersales services should be implemented meticulously and precisely to apply the selected strategy and benefit from the advantages within the sector.
The fiercest step of creation of organization is the determination of internal efficiency/productivity and external flexibity levels of organisation. Internal productivity/efficiency, functionality of organisational efficiency, and external flexibity are inversely proportional concepts. In other words, when internal productivity/efficiency rises, external flexibity decreases. Organizations, which are designed to have external flexibity in its actions, have a horizontal organizational structure. Dominant factors of this organisation type includes task sharing, authority delegation, soft hierarchy, face-to-face communication, teamwork and decentralised decision making mechanism. On the other hand, organizations, which are designed for high efficiency, have vertical organizational structure. Dominant factors of this organization type are specialised tasks, firmer hierarchy, large number of rules and instructions, vertical communication, excessive numbers of detailed reports and reporting systems, lower levels of teamwork and centralised decision-making mechanism.
The level of profitability has been declining day by day due to the rising competition level within aftersales services of automotive industry in global markets. For this reason, aftersales service companies have been increasing the volume of their work within service workshops on one hand, they have also been trying to increase the sales of spare parts within by means of field works, on the other hand. The first job in order to increase the volume of work within service workshops is to improve the customer satisfaction along with spare part/labour amount per work order. On the other hand, active spare part/marketing teams should be organized and services should be provided to other service workshops (they are also rivals) in order to increase the sales volume of spare parts out of service workshop. Due to nature of aftersales services of automotive industry, wrecked vehicles shall be repaired by means of authorized services and/or individual services. Insurance companies mostly compensate the price of such repairments. The volume of traffic and land vehicles insurance market indicates the importance of repairments for service and spare part providers. Therefore, it is so crucial to establish organizations which will set up and maintain relations with insurance companies for the companies which aim to create added value by means of aftersales services.
The measures for increasing the income within the service are usually concerning the efficiency of the company. Optimum number of staff shall be determined and also the staff should be governed by means of an effective management style in order to increase the customer satisfaction. The reduction of costs within the service, on the other hand, is usually related to efficiency level. It will not be possible to maintain customer satisfaction unless the costs are controlled.
Nevertheless, a flexible sales/marketing team is needed in order to be successful out of service workshop. This team shall keep in touch with the service workshops of competitors and try to sell spare parts to them. The team shall use its experience and knowledge to develop its clients, in other words competitors during this process. In spite of high profit levels, most of the companies do not want to sell spare parts out of the service workshop. Some service workshops dealing with this business usually use spare parts sales teams together with the teams in the workshop. However, the companies, which would like to be ahead of their competitors within the market, shall seperate active spare part sales/marketing teams from current structure and support the development and progress of this team with a different point of view since a new profit center within the corporation shall be successful by implementing a different strategy and following a different route. Spare part sales and marketing organisation shall differ from the current service workshop organisation. While internal workshop organisation is trying to make more sales to customers, organisation of active spare parts sales both tries to find new customers outside and makes sales to them and also sell its products with minimum profit rate to meet the requirements of insurance companies and also develop logistics systems.
As soon as the organisations within workshop and out of workshop are established, the first job to do is to allocate appropriate staff for every position. Human resoruces is the only source for the success of organisations. It is not possible to expect success and good performance from the organization if it is composed of low-motivated and inexperienced human resources. Key functions of internal organisation of service workshop are service and damage advisers. The corporation shall confront customer loss and a reduction in turnover, in case any problem occures between those advisers and customers. In addition to this, work repeats will rise, unnecessary part replacements shall be performed, repairments shall not be finished on time and in this way, customers will be lost when the system is not efficient. On the other hand, an employee who is marketing active spare parts out of the workshop shall come up against an another service which is his customer. For this reason, the sales person shall know both his own products and the products of competitors in perfect manner and ensure the proper logistics of the parts he is used to selling. Higher motivation of the team causes better performance.
As a result, establishment of organization for needs of aftersales services and appropriate human resources within organizations shall make contribution for increasing the value of company.
