Entercoms
Reaping the Rewards of Post-sales Service

It used to be said, “Organizations compete on supply chains,” which stands true in today’s hyper-competitive, near real-time enterprise engagement. However, growing enterprises don’t stop there. They invest in post-sales services that continually deliver the brand experience to their clients, customers, and partners.

Historically, companies have underinvested in the post-sales arena, missing out on opportunities to create long-term, high-value customer relationships. The founders of Dallas-based Entercoms, Nitin Ahuja and Rahul Singh saw this gap, and launched Entercoms to address the business challenges companies faced in the post-sales service parts management world. “We found that despite having a huge post-sales market opportunity, companies were not allocating the right talent, technologies, and tools to manage key post-sales service functions,” explains Singh, President and Chief Strategy Officer. As domain experts in supply chain, Singh and Ahuja founded Entercoms to address the long-tail service supply chain challenges through a combination of deep domain expertise, and powerful technology to deliver business insights.

Entercoms helps enterprises achieve real business outcomes by connecting intelligence from the asset installed base to the parts supply chain. Companies can use Entercoms’ Service Supply Chain Control Tower to actively manage key supply chain performance metrics, and build a 360 degree view of their customers and assets to manage service level performance and uncover revenue opportunities. “Our core focus is to help companies energize their end-to-end service supply chain through actionable operational intelligence,” adds Singh.

Traditionally, post-sales product lifecycle planning was reactive, but companies are now moving to being more proactive, and this often requires orchestrating a diverse body of operational data. As smart, connected products become more ubiquitous, data volumes are expanding. As more data becomes available to mine, companies can leverage predictive modeling to gain a competitive edge. Entercoms has stayed on top of this trend by developing its own advanced analytical applications to help transform service supply chains.

Entercoms’ Customer 360 solution consolidates customer and asset information to create a complete descriptive and predictive view of the service customer. It allows enterprises to envision an end-to-end picture of their installed base—from tracking service and warranty contracts to sensing new value opportunities. This 360-degree view of service customers, augmented with predictive analytics, enables companies to gain new insights into revenue opportunities and areas for improving service delivery performance. Complementing Customer 360, another key offering of the company, Asset Radar, tracks changes to the asset installed base, and helps companies maintain accurate asset installed base data. The company is already leveraging AI and machine learning techniques to detect new revenue opportunities in the service supply chain and to predict post-sales product lifecycles.

Our core focus is energizing the post-sales service supply chain through a combination of analytics and deep domain expertise

Focusing on the spare parts supply chain, Entercoms’ Service Supply Chain Control Tower provides highly granular actionable insights into the performance of the service supply chain – from lifecycle forecasting to managing spare parts inventory. The control tower solution uses predictive models to proactively manage service levels and prevent buildup of excess inventory in the service supply chain. Further, it incorporates learning through automated root cause analysis, which allows planners and operations managers to optimize their processes over time.

Creating an accurate picture of the asset installed base remains a big industry challenge. “We are looking at technologies such as blockchain to track assets that change hands across multiple parties,” says Singh. Entercoms will soon launch SpareX—a solution targeted towards managing parts in the asset installed base—to drive predictive maintenance of critical, high value assets. Along with such R&D investments, Entercoms is planning to expand beyond the U.S. and European geography to address growing demand for its solutions in the Asian market.