Weir Minerals: Digitalizing customer service execution and data collection
Explore Weir Minerals’ customer service journey
With a commitment to sustainability, Weir Minerals has more than 11,000 employees across 60 countries. The mining equipment manufacturer helps customers work at their fullest, most-sustainable potential. So, to improve customer equipment availability and data management, it chose the SAP Field Service Management solution to digitalize siloed processes.
| Industry | Region | Company Size |
| Industrial manufacturing | Sydney, Australia | >11,000 employees |
greater satisfaction with better-quality data and service.
time saved when generating customer service reports.
timelier reports with real-time time sheets and parts records.
Global Process Owner Service, Weir Minerals
Digitalizing the delivery of asset service management reports for customers
Weir Minerals, part of The Weir Group plc, creates innovative engineering solutions for mineral and mining technology markets. Servicing a regionally distributed clientele, Weir Minerals depends on a carefully synchronized web of data processing and analysis systems that give it the right balance of foresight and agility to sustainably manage customer data. Operating through an integrated system of tech hubs, manufacturing operations, and local service centers, the company creates sustainability solutions that help track the lifecycle of mining equipment, predict part deterioration, and minimize detrimental environmental impacts.
However, Weir Minerals had been hosting most of its records and data in isolated offline sources that rely on manual intervention, such as Microsoft Excel spreadsheets. Such reliance on siloed data sources left the company – and by extension, its customers – vulnerable to a series of risks. This inefficient approach to collecting and processing data and inventory planning was time-consuming, prone to human error, and difficult to adapt to changing circumstances. Often, technicians would need to travel from location to location to collect necessary customer audit data. By the time that data was properly categorized, it was largely outdated, preventing the company from making agile supply chain decisions, like having the foresight to order specific spare parts for aging machines. Additionally, personnel had to focus on completing paperwork and other low-value tasks that took precious time from their schedules, preventing them from focusing on giving customers the level of service they desired. This inefficiency and a lack of central digitalization left customers wanting more.
To remediate its relationships with customers and continue its mission of sustainability, the company needed to digitalize its core infrastructure to match modern technology and data analysis standards.
Revitalizing data processing environments to enhance agility
As a long-standing SAP solutions customer, Weir Minerals was confident it could find a solution within the portfolio that could meet its unique inventory planning and data processing needs. The company created a team of 200 employees to conduct a two- to three-month evaluation to ensure that the SAP Field Service Management solution could meet the needs of its widespread remote workforce. The task force agreed that SAP Field Service Management was ideal due to its centralized and digitalized hubs, which would prevent manual errors, reduce silos, and improve transparency. The company also used the customer service functionality of the SAP ERP application.
With the integration of SAP ERP and SAP Field Service Management, as shown in the diagram, Weir Minerals could quickly create digital customer service history reports. These factors could help improve communication between the back office and in-field technicians, as it would facilitate the collection and analysis of real-time, centralized data. The company began to set up a change management framework that established internal project ownership instead of relying on a third-party implementation.
With SAP Field Service Management integrated with SAP ERP, the company has enhanced its internal data collection infrastructure with a digitalized channel that offers real-time insights without excess manual processes that take up precious employee time. The solutions allow technicians to make vital service notes in a digital environment instead of on paper, which improves data availability for both personnel and customers. Through a greater level of communication in terms of audits, supply, and demand, the company curates customer recommendations at a much faster, more-precise rate and has an improved view of relevant service information. Weir Minerals can better forecast consumer demand by monitoring machine lifespan and inventory data, allowing it to swiftly provide customers with solutions for their issues instead of having to rely on outdated information. Once the company could establish real-time visibility in multiple environments, including on mobile devices in the field, it could continue its work and satisfy its customers more effectively.
Creating agile analysis environments to forecast supply-and-demand needs
Since implementing SAP Field Service Management integrated with SAP ERP, Weir Minerals has seen numerous business benefits. Data veracity and visibility are critical: the solutions let the business digitally collect and analyze customer data, which helps it create predictive models to outline product demand, maintenance, and quality, and generate service history reports. SAP Field Service Management also enables the company to use a built-in digital data integration that facilitates smoother analysis on the back end. Weir Minerals technicians can upload daily digital reports from both mobile and site-based devices, which increases enterprise-wide data richness. These reports also make data analysis and collection much faster, improve communication between technicians and the back end, and eliminate the need to use time-consuming, error-prone paper processes.
These readily available reports and digitalized channels of data recording help both field employees and customers better understand how customers use equipment. This informs sustainability measures and allows personnel to improve how they predict trends in the demand of customer spare parts. Through sophisticated, digitalized data insights, the company can determine that proper part inventory is available at the right warehouse, allowing it to quickly meet customer needs.
The solution setup and mobile integration capabilities further empower Weir Minerals employees to drive change and digital adoption in the field. These adaptable employees are improving customer satisfaction on the ground with their enhanced data analytics and digitalized ability to implement smoother and more-relevant sustainability measures into customers’ operations. This data availability and agility is especially appealing for Weir Minerals customers, who demand data transparency and clear service history reports.
Broadening its SAP portfolio to further optimize planning processes
After the successful implementation of SAP Field Service Management integrated with SAP ERP, Weir Minerals is making plans to use more data management, available-to-promise, and inventory planning solutions from the SAP solutions portfolio. The company has its eyes on the SAP Advanced Planning and Optimization component, which it hopes will provide even more digitalization, product availability, and data accuracy to customers.
Additionally, the company is interested in implementing the SAP Transportation Management application, which it would use to further enhance its logistics planning and transportation processes at scale across its global enterprise. No matter how its technological framework evolves in a modern industry, Weir Minerals is dedicated to its sustainability efforts and intends to use its strengthened infrastructure to drive eco-friendly mining operations for its customers.