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To begin, it’s worth explaining the purpose of WesTrac’s Client Solutions team.
It’s a relatively new initiative that brings together a lot of the collective expertise that exists across the company to really help us provide value in our customer experience offerings, using insights and solutions to help you increase the availability, productivity and safety of your assets.
The whole point is that we want to ensure customers understand that working with WesTrac is not simply a transaction-based relationship about purchasing equipment, parts and services, but a more collaborative partnership where we can be the trusted advisors, where you can leverage our expertise in equipment to get more out of your investments. We believe we're well placed to increase the value that our customers get from their machines.
Our FitFleet Customer Value Agreements (CVAs) are all about keeping equipment in the best possible shape to provide maximum productivity, efficiency and safety performance.
Introduced in 2020, we now include a FitFleet CVA with every machine purchase.
It all begins with machine connectivity. There is hardware on all new machines – which can also be retrofitted to older models - that allows the WesTrac team to get data from the machines, analyse it and provide you with detailed insights to help improve the health and utilisation of your assets. While there can be some quite complex analysis involved to get to the right insights, we do that for you and wrap it up in a way that’s really useful, really easy and really focused on what you care about most.
There are four different types of FitFleet CVAs, or tiers, each offering different levels of support.
All tiers include the sophisticated data analysis and insights into machine condition, which are provided to you. What differs are the service arrangements that come with each tier. Some customers just want to be alerted to the insights, then will organise maintenance, repair or mitigation steps as required, while others want an end-to-end service to ensure their machines are being maintained to the highest OEM standards.
It starts with FitFleet Essentials, which comes as a standard inclusion with every machine purchase and helps you understand what's going on. You will be alerted to any issues and upcoming maintenance requirements, then make your own arrangements for parts and services on a “pay-as-you-go” basis.
The next tier is FitFleet Plus, which incorporates supply of parts into a flat cost structure that could be bundled in as part of a finance agreement. It’s ideally suited to customers that may have a preference for doing their own servicing but want to ensure a smooth cash flow.
The FitFleet Premium tier adds the benefit of having trained WesTrac service technicians carry out maintenance requirements, again with costs built in to ensure no major spikes in expenditure from one month to the next.
The highest tier is FitFleet Ultimate, which covers all parts, maintenance and repair services, and is typically customised to help you address specific issues you’re dealing with. That could include things like guarantees on component life or minimum levels of availability.
FitFleet CVAs are far more than an extended warranty or fixed-price service arrangement.
For one, they are based on WesTrac having access to, and using the comprehensive data that can be captured from machines. That means you can move from that fixed hour maintenance regime to more predictive and preventative maintenance designed to reduce costs and improve availability and reliability.
Secondly, we are genuinely focused on what our customers care most about. That impacts the way we use that data and determines how we make recommendations to really increase the value of your machines, whether your focus be more on availability, productivity or safety elements. It’s really focused on what expertise WesTrac can bring by looking at your data and working towards the outcomes that you can get from your machines.
Of course, the proof is in the pudding. So, what does success look like for you on a FitFleet CVA?
There are plenty of examples of real value being derived from the service. A couple of months ago, one of our condition monitoring analysts uncovered a possible issue based on data regarding the exhaust temperature of a client’s machine. That led to a more in-depth diagnosis being carried out, a problem was identified, and the issue was resolved before it became serious. And that resulted in the customer on the entry level Essentials CVA saving over $70,000 on a component failure that was waiting to happen.
That's just one example. We see these types of stories daily and while the dollar values aren't always that high, the recommendations our analysts put forward really do result in saving you money. FitFleet is providing a safety net by proactively looking at issues that are evident in the data before they turn into problems that cause downtime and can result in significant costs to overcome.
At the other end of the spectrum, when it comes to Ultimate CVAs, we've been working with a customer who’s been struggling over the years to extend the engine life of their equipment. They have a reasonable size fleet and know that one aspect of revenue growth is to maximise the operating life of their machines between rebuilds or replacements. Their experience has shown that some engines will make it, some won't. They were looking for greater consistency and reliability.
By using the data and advanced analytics, we can better understand their maintenance practices, we can better understand why the engines might fail, identify improved maintenance procedures and therefore build in lifetime guarantees based on achieving a set number of hours with a certain maintenance schedule and cost. It’s proving to be a bit of a game changer for the customer and it's something that we're really excited about working on with others.
In summary, FitFleet is all about determining how we can be proactive in helping you make sure you're achieving optimum availability and productivity outcomes at the lowest possible cost. That's what WesTrac really wants to do. We’re the experts in equipment management and maintenance, and these agreements are built around how we can leverage that expertise to help you be more successful.
If you want to find out more about WesTrac’s FitFleet CVAs and how you can benefit, click below.
