Juniper Networks' customers depend on the company's routers, switches, software, and other networking equipment to run and secure the wide-area networks that they use each day to communicate with partners, staff, and employees. It's not surprising, then, that most of its customers expect that when a piece of Juniper's equipment stops working, it will get fixed quickly. Almost all of Juniper's customers have signed service contracts that require failed equipment to be fixed or replaced the same or the next day. Some of Juniper's customers have service-level agreements (SLAs) in place that require replacement or repair within four hours.
Unfortunately, until fairly recently, Juniper too often failed to live up to all of its SLA commitments. That's because the processes and systems that Juniper used to plan and requisition the repair parts needed to fix field units were largely manual and unable to keep up with its rapidly growing business. Juniper's customer satisfaction ratings were mediocre, and the company was having trouble selling premium service contracts.
Two years ago, however, Juniper decided to replace the manual processes for planning, tracking, and requisitioning service parts with a new system that integrates with the company's order management, call tracking, and contract management applications, and allows Juniper to do a better job of spare parts planning, procurement, and allocation.
The Service Parts Management system from Servigistics initially allowed Juniper to recoup $3.5 million worth of inventory through proper reallocation in 2006. Since then, the system has helped Juniper cut operating expenses 13%, increase material availability by 15%, improve on-time spare parts delivery across all levels of service by 27%, and reduce customer dissatisfaction by 40%.