Antarctica recently completed a pilot project with one of the global leaders in the enterprise storage space, who provide customers worldwide with a broad range of hardware and software storage solutions. With an increasing number of players in the space, and hardware becoming more ubiquitous, the price per megabyte of storage is decreasing. The company was in need of new revenue streams to maintain their competitive leadership role.

With thousands of customers, including more than half of the Fortune 100, looking to their current install base for additional revenues was an obvious choice. In addition to storage hardware and software, the company also derives revenues from customer service and support and selling maintenance/warranty packages. In examining existing customer data and revenue streams, it became obvious that there were a number of eligible revenue opportunities that were simply not being capitalized on. Specifically:

• 25% of customers who were receiving support after their warranties had expired, were not being billed
• 80% of service hours performed were not being billed

Because the company is supporting customers with older equipment that has passed the warranty expiration date, they are missing further opportunities to sell maintenance contracts and/or upgrade the customer to newer equipment.

In addition to these missed revenues, the company discovered that their software and service sales were under-represented relative to hardware sales, with only 30% of potential software and less than 10% of potential services being sold to customers.

The company was also facing increased attrition rates. While they have volumes of customer data, they had no easy way to provide customers with their purchasing, service and warranty information. It is easy for customers to lose track of what they already have or let products fall off warranty, resulting in huge and avoidable maintenance costs.

Further examination revealed a number of situations where the company was spending too much to support customers, such as:

• Huge inventory costs: because the company cannot identify the quantity or location of older equipment that must be serviced, they are forced to maintain excess inventories of older parts and equipment, accounting for almost 40% of inventories
• Continuing to service customers with high receivables
• No way to determine if take-out programs, to replace obsolete equipment at customers, were successful
• Difficulty identifying if a customer had a non-optimal storage configuration that required more support and maintenance than necessary

Buried Intelligence

The company has invested heavily in data warehouse and Business Intelligence tools, ranging from Business Objects to Oracle Financial to ClarifyCRM, all in an effort to collect and structure relevant business performance data. While these tools are great at aggregating and slicing and dicing information, they provide only snapshots of 1-2 dimensions of information, often requiring the user to access each disparate system and consult multiple reports and analysts to isolate the data they need.

These missed revenue opportunities and higher than necessary support costs exist because the data is not in a readily useable and accessible format, to allow an Account Manager or Customer Service Representative to make decisions at the time a support call is placed, or services are rendered.

How can the company leverage the information they have invested so much in collecting and organizing, to stem their leaking margins and improve revenues and reduce the costs to serve their customers?

To clarify, add detail

The company chose to implement a pilot project with Antarctica Systems' Visual Net software, to create a web-enabled visual map interface for their support call data - a small but vital subset of their critical business information. The first step was to combine data from five disparate systems, including Business Objects and Oracle, and organize it into one taxonomic scheme, which formed the basis for the maps. The second step was to identify all important pieces of metadata relating to the support calls, such as the number of support calls for a particular customer or piece of equipment, or if a warranty had expired, and use this information to bring those calls to the top of the maps so they are immediately identified as potential issues to be investigated.

The resulting maps contain data on over 10,000 support calls, which are placed on a visual landscape allowing the users to drill down through the categories, and use visual cues such as size, location and color to find the information. The company's users -from executives to front line operators- all share a common picture of their data, enterprise-wide, so they "see" what is really going on.

Unlike their current Business Intelligence reporting tools and dashboards, Visual Net packs 300-400% more content on one screen, simultaneously presenting both macro and micro views so users have more information at their fingertips, with little effort - and no need to consult other databases or reports to isolate issues and investigate anomalies.

Results you can see

Deployment of the support call visualization was completed in less the 2 weeks, with users able to immediately point and click through the information to fully leverage their support call data and identify specific areas of weakness and opportunity. With its flexibility and customizability, Visual Net can address all of the company's revenue and cost issues, specifically:

• Those products whose warranties are expiring, what service hours have to be billed and which products are under-penetrated, so revenue leaks can be plugged.
• Potentially defecting customers such as those who have spent
• Those products whose warranties are expiring, what service hours have to be billed and which products are under-penetrated, so revenue leaks can be plugged.
• Potentially defecting customers such as those who have spent X% YTD vs. last YTD and let users drill down into specific details such as the products in question, how many service calls they have made and their severity, so Account Managers can call upon these customers to save them from looking elsewhere.
• What products and services could be sold to key customers, in the form of upgrades, maintenance contracts and services, so that cross-sell and up-sell opportunities are capitalized on.
• Each customers' equipment, performance, service history etc, with the ability to drill down into details so customers can easily access their purchasing history and would be less likely to leave.
• The impact of product take-out initiatives to remove outdated equipment from customer sites.
• Customers with high support costs, service calls, severity codes, high receivables, channel candidates so customers and products with excess support costs can be managed to reduce those costs.
• Older products by region and customer site that could potentially be replaced so old/obsolete inventory can be eliminated or reduced.