Name: Improve Aftermarket Performance with Syncron
Uploaded: 2026-05-27T16:30:10.742Z
Duration: 36 min 56 s
Description: Improve Aftermarket Performance with Syncron

Transcript for "Improve Aftermarket Performance with Syncron": Good morning, everybody, and thank you so much for taking some time out of your schedule to, join us here today. We're we're excited about, the content that we're bringing to you today, with a new partnership that we're we're truly excited to have gotten off the ground. We've recently partnered with Synchron. He is the leader in aftermarket business. If you're familiar with GoEngineering, you know that, you know, our our business is to help manufacturing companies from the beginning stages of of ideation around product design, managing all that product design, all the way through to the back end of manufacturing and and supply chain planning and optimization. And Synchron brings a perfect, counterpart to what we're doing there in that back end managing the aftermarket business. They're the leader in the aftermarket business, for heavy equipment, complex equipment. The customers buy, and then they need a long term solution for how do they manage the maintenance and parts and those things of of that process, well, the OEMs that are responsible for that have to manage that business and make sure that their parts are available in the right places at the right time and priced at the right, in the right way. And Synchron has a fantastic, AI built, AI purpose built platform. We manage that and grow that business. So today, we've got, Ben Groenfeld with us. He's a senior solution architect, with Synchron who's gonna take us through a a little tour of what is Synchron, what are their products, what do they do, and how can they really help you improve your aftermarket business. So, Ben, I'll turn it over to you. Thanks, thanks, Darren. Really appreciate it and and happy to be here. Really excited about the partnership with with GoEngineer. As Darren mentioned, my name is Ben Groenevold. I've been with Synchron for about, little over five years now. And today, we just wanted to give you guys a nice overview of Synchron solutions, what we do, how we do it, and who we do it for, and then, be able to give you some some next steps going forward. So I'm sure most of you guys know, especially if you're dealing with parts and service on a daily basis, the environment that we're in today is rapidly changing. We have customers having ever higher expectations. I think the more technologically advanced customers get, the higher their expectations go. With that being, there's a fast changing technology landscape that complicates things. And at the same time, manufacturers have become to understand that a way to increase both the top and bottom line for their companies is to grow their their service revenue. All these forces are converging right now, and it's causing some interesting trends in the marketplace and a real need for solutions that Synchron can provide. At the same time that those forces are colliding, being good at parts and service operations is is a must. The customer experience as that even as their expectations increase, it becomes even more important because it increasingly drives the buying decision. Companies realize that even when they grow their revenue, that aftermarket and parts and service can be a huge source of profit for the larger company. That's forcing, like I mentioned earlier, an investment in tech, and then hopefully bringing this together can can increase shareholder value if your parts and service and aftermarket is is running properly. While there's a need to be excellent in the aftermarket, you can't do it with the same old tools. So this right here is just a comparison of what manufacturers typically see when they look at their supply chain from a manufacturing perspective versus an aftermarket or a parts and service perspective. Really, the managing of that aftermarket or that service supply chain, depending upon how you describe it, is really different than managing traditional or forward manufacturing supply chains. The nature of the demand is different. What's needed and when it's needed is different. The number of items or SKUs is different when you're comparing physical end products versus parts. Your strategies and how you manage these businesses are going to be different. And then also the life cycle, the length of time it takes to manage these, businesses are completely different. And what that tells us is that you can't always use the same old tools that you use for your forward or manufacturing supply chain to get some of the benefits that are required to make your aftermarket or service supply chain, in excellent or put it in tip top shape. And that's where Synchron truly comes in. So we're a software company a 100% focused on what we call aftermarket service optimization. What does that mean? Really, our goal is we're we're trying to empower manufacturers to be able to capitalize on that service economy that they may have, their parts and service operations, their aftermarket. Let them be able to become excellent on that side of the business and provide the same powerful tools there that is typically placed on the manufacturing side. Synchron's been around for a little over twenty five twenty five years years now. We're even though we've been we were founded in in Sweden, we're a global company with customers in over a 100 plus countries. And what's really unique about Synchron is not only our focus on the aftermarket, but also our focus in in these key industries. We break down most majority of our customers fall within these eight market segments, what we call our core markets, automotive, construction and mining, industrial equipment, agricultural equipment, but then also our core extensions. We've got aerospace, consumer durables, high-tech, and medical equipment. So we're basically spending time with the manufacturers that make things and then have to repair those things to keep their customers happy. And shown here is just a few of the customers that Synchron has. What it what it's meant to to to drive home the point of is that leading manufacturers and distributors of the parts for those manufacturers rely on Synchron to provide aftermarket and parts and service excellence. So how does Synchron do that? Our solution strategy is basically boiled down to to three main main pillars. What we wanna do is we wanna help our customers increase their brand loyalty. That could be either with providing tools and solutions that drive increased loyalty at the dealership level, the independent or distributor level, or if they're selling directly to end customers. If we're increasing the brand loyalty, that means that they're buying more parts from our customers, and then they're eventually going to buy the next machine or piece of equipment from from that customer as well. That leads right into our second pillar, which is the ability and and what we want to enable of of growing revenue and market share growth. Like I said, that could be immediately in parts and the associated services, but then what we wanna be able to is tie that eventually to the next machine or that next vehicle that's purchased by the distribution channel. And then finally, how do we accomplish that is we optimize the service performance. We wanna be able to help our customers enable machine and equipment uptime, which means that their aftermarket is running profitably, efficiently, and they've got the right engagement from both their dealers, distributors, or customers. And when you bring those things together, Synchron really wants to help our customers with business reliance. We wanna be able to provide them with the proper visibility in their aftermarket, the ability to automate tasks where they can be automated, and that's where our technology and a lot of our focus goes through. But then also to be agile and to be able to have our solutions grow with your aftermarket or change with your aftermarket. And that's especially important with what we've seen over the last five or six years starting with COVID, tariffs, supply chain shocks, etcetera, we've had our customers change the way they've used our solutions and and really benefited from the adaptability that Synchron can provide. So that's a little bit about who is Synchron and who Synchron serves and how does Synchron serve it, but what does Synchron provide? So for the focus of today's conversations, we wanna we wanna spend our time in in two core areas of Synchron's solution profile. The first is service parts pricing, being able to price service parts into the market. And the second piece is service parts planning, being able to make sure that the right part is at the right spot at the right time. So starting with service parts pricing, our customers have a variety of challenges, and I've put up here, some stats, related to that based upon some studies that Synchron's done in the past. But for a lot of manufacturers, parts pricing is a manual black box process. They need more sophisticated tools than what they're currently using. There's a lot of guesswork in there, a lot of peanut butter spreads doing treating each part the same. Those are just some of the challenges, and you can see that from the results of the survey that Synchron did in 2023. You know, over half of half of our manufacturing leaders that we pulled said that there were too many manual or paper processes around pricing. But there's also some opportunities. A lot of our customers and prospective customers come to us looking to automate repetitive tasks. They wanna bring transparency and bring the pricing process faster to the market. A lot of this is due to all the different cost changes that they've experienced in the last couple years due to that environment changing. They wanna get rid of the peanut butter spread. So they wanna be able to increase profit and market share where it makes sense. A lot of our customers are starting to see resistance from their customers on just increasing prices overall, so you've gotta be more tailored to that process. And then they wanna start using advanced technologies to help them accurately predict costs to serve models. And so when costs change, prices can react accordingly and properly. So that's where Synchron's pricing product comes in. The goal of the of our price solution is to optimize your ability to price spare parts or service parts. What we wanna be able to do is segment the spare parts business by either product types, customers, and then create an optimized pricing strategy to maximize revenue and margin. We've got some, good customer value that we've brought to our customers where we've seen, you know, revenue increases up to 7%. But what we've also done is been able to reduce pricing changes from something that used to take hours and days inside of spreadsheets to minutes based upon how much automation a customer may leverage inside of the system. So how does Synchron price accomplish those goals? Well, we kinda if you wanna break down the philosophy of our solution, you could really easily do that in five main areas. The first off, from a user perspective, is we want to improve the operational productivity of our users. That means automating the spare part parts pricing process based upon the rules and the business process outcomes that each manufacturer is trying to achieve. We wanna be able to optimize the profitability. So we wanna be able to support your different parts pricing strategies and have a more tailored approach. Gone are the days of just cost plus pricing for all your parts. We wanna be able to treat either individual parts, certain customer segments, certain product segments differently to have that more tailored approach. You can't do one and two without being able to gain full visibility of your pricing process. So we wanna be able to bring all this information from your multiple products, your multiple customers, maybe multiple divisions or businesses that a manufacturer may have, different markets that they may have. Bring that together and be able to provide a complete picture. Think about a single source of truth for all your pricing needs. If we're able to do that, we allow for our users to have more informed and powerful decisions using our analytics tools, using our technology to analyze both historic information, market information, and then also your current pricing strategies. And if we're able to do all that, what we wanna be able to do is have a more tailored pricing process and be that hopefully is able to maximize profit, but also keep your customers happy and not complaining about the inconsistencies in your parts pricing. So shown here is just an example of how Synchron price works today. So what we'll do is we'll gather information from our customer systems, typically an ERP or product master or order management system. And what we're looking to gather is item information, orders information, and then customer information in order to drive our segments. And then we'll we'll be able to attack your pricing strategy in four main areas, be able to put together the proper proper segmentation, be able for for you to build whatever list prices that you need. This is especially important if you've got a multi tier or a or multiple channel distribution model. You wanna treat your dealers or your distributors different from your end customers. Different markets may need different pricing lists. We can manage all of that for you. Be able to set up and run what if simulations so that you can understand either cost increases that need to take place, segment chain changes that need to take place, or different profit or margin goals that you wanna model out, and then be able to overlay on there any feedback you're getting from your customers or field or competitive pricing information. Put that together inside of the Synchron solution, and what you're gonna get out of that are two main pieces of information. The prices that you can then publish to your customers and use inside of your ERP or your order management system, but then also if you need to send quotes out to customers, we'll be able your quoting system or your ERP can go grab the proper price for that process and then be able to use it for your quote process. So that's just a little bit of how Synchron price works today. Wanna jump over to Synchron to the parts planning side, and we've got customers with challenges just like we experience on the price side. They experience them in from a parts planning and inventory management perspective. There's their end customers expect high availability for the millions of spare part manage. This is especially true if you've produced machines or pieces of equipment that have long life cycles. You're probably gonna have lots of different spare parts. Or if you manufacture equipment or machines that have lots of different models, you're probably gonna have lots of spare parts or service parts. And customers expect those parts to be in stock at the right location all the time. But then you also have to balance that with the investment that you're gonna make. Parts inventories, you don't wanna get stuck high parts inventories, you don't wanna get stuck with a lot of excess and write off. At the same time, you also don't wanna be beating on your supply base for emergency rush, critical unit down orders because you just incur a lot of associated, fees and processing costs that aren't necessary if you plan, proficiently in the first place. If you're able to go overcome those challenges, there's also a lot of opportunities there from, parts planning perspective. You can grow parts and service revenues. The parts on on shelf at the right place, you can sell it at the right time fast. You can reduce stock and your service parts inventory, maximize that inventory investment. And this is really backed up by by that same survey that we did in 2023 regarding the challenges around spare parts and inventory optimization. The market's telling us that there's too many paper processes. There's a big issue of having the incorrect distribution of stock. You might have it somewhere in your network, but it's not in the proper spot. And then also, of course, the age old issue of predicting or forecasting that service parts demand because it is really different than predicting or planning for the demand that you have on the manufacturing side. And that's where sync Synchron's inventory solution comes in. What what we're looking to accomplish for our customers is the ability to optimize and leverage their service supply chain, be able to deliver proper demand forecasting, inventory optimization, and replenishment capabilities, and streamline that process so it's less of a burden. This is especially true when we have a lot of manufacturers that have done a lot of investment on their forward supply chain, and they have not and investment is kind of lagged on the service part side. You've got your MRP working in your in for your manufacturing process, but you may be planning your service parts in spreadsheets or in access databases. We wanna help you overcome some of those technological limitations so that you can truly maximize your your service parts the value of your service parts inventory. And that's where we've been able to see quite some positive results for our customers, an increase in parts availability, the reducing reduction of the inventory investment, but then also a decrease in high freight costs due to not having to chase those emergency orders around. And, really, when it comes down to taking that step and and and getting a separate solution or a solution tailored for managing your parts, service parts inventory, you wanna be able to to hit these three areas first. You wanna be able to make the correct stock, non stock decision. Is my should my part be at that location at that time? This is especially true for manufacturers that may have many service locations out in their markets, whether they be big distribution centers or small local branches. You gotta make this proper decision of should that part be there at that particular time. And you need tools to be able to properly control which items are stocked, the service levels that they're stocked at, and then be able to segment and classify that inventory and perform the proper analysis. Once you've made a stock, non stock decision or allowed the Synchron solution to make that stock, non stock decision, you have to be able to understand the impact of that decision, be able to perform what if simulations to understand how much inventory is either gonna go up or go down, or how many parts you're gonna add to a particular branch, or how many parts you may take away from from from a branch. And to be able to compare scenarios and pick the which one's best for your business at that particular time. You may need to put a budget constraint in. You may be able to take a budget constraint out, for example. Once that is understood and you've got the proper strategy in place, we wanna automate the replenishment process as much as possible. We wanna take a lot of the guesswork out, take a lot of the time it takes to review replenishment orders. If you trust the stock, non stock decision and you trust the calculations coming out of the system, there should be less of a need to sit there and review orders all day. And you can get your planners and and analysts and branch managers or location managers focused on either the problem parts, focused on helping customers, and and really focused on what I would call true value added activities because the basic blocking and tackling is taken care of. And so how does Synchron do that? This is a very similar diagram to what I showed you for Synchron's pricing capabilities. From an inventory or for a parts planning capability, what we're looking to be able to gather from our customers is their current inventory picture, what demand they have, whether you can give it to us at an aggregate bucket level or lower transactional demand. The system is flexible enough to handle either. And then auto also some item master information is needed. And and inside of Synchron, we're able to complete a forecasting process that's tailored to service parts, inventory optimization, including that stock, non stock decision capabilities, Replenishment, whether you're replenishing from one supplier, multiple suppliers, or if you need to do inter branch transfers or redistribution between your distribution centers can be set up. So how you have your network today can be can be configured inside of Synchron's replenishment capabilities. And then what automation rules do we wanna put in place? What items are most important for people to take a look at? What orders qualify to be reviewed, and what can be automated and send on its way to save everyone time and then measure the results. The two things that would go back to your ERP or your execution system would be those recommended orders, whether they be reviewed and approved or automatically generated, and then also any transfers that you have set up and allowed for inside the system depending upon the network that you have. So that's just a high level overview of how Synchron's parts pricing and parts planning solutions work. One of the things that I wanted to provide you is some feedback from our customers. I pulled some some some quotes here for both price parts pricing customers and our inventory parts planning customers to show you some of the range of feedback we've gotten in the past. If you start in the top left, Synchron price is an out of box solution, but it offers a lot of flexibility. That is especially true now more than ever, like I mentioned earlier, about how the market and the world is changing with COVID first, tariffs, all these supply chain shocks. You can't just use a single pricing strategy for all your service parts. You have to take advantage of some of that configure flexibility. It's nice to have it in an out of the box solution. Scroll a little bit over to the right. Synchron price or in the middle. I'm sorry. Synchron price is helping us through data consolidation, automated process, providing consistency for their next success. And then some feedback on on the inventory side. If you go right below that in the middle, due to the Synchronoss solution, we've enjoyed stable results over many years while minimizing our efforts. We're continuing to report high availability, and inventory rate is below their goal. And then finally, in the bottom right, we intend to roll this system out further to a nearly global level for this manufacturer. With more data, we can adapt to meet seasonal demands, better predict the slow movers, and improve our forecasts. Like I said, this is just a sample of the feedback Synchron had Synchron's customers has provided back to Synchron. So how do you get started? Feel free, please, head over to synchronic.com to learn more about our solutions. There's individual case studies there, more details on what I can just provide in this short webinar. And, also, feel free to reach out to Darren at GoEngineer to discuss ways Synchron can help your com company and improve your aftermarket or service supply chain. That's awesome. Thank you, Ben, for for giving us that kinda high level, view of of how Synchrony can help. Everybody, we've got a poll up right now. If you if you can take ten seconds to go and answer that poll and then we got another short one after that, that would be great. In the meantime, Ben, there's some questions that have come in, and and I have a couple of questions if it if you'd permit me to ask them. Sure. Feel free. So great presentation. Of course, what what's most exciting to you about what you're bringing to the audience today? What is it that you really want them to get jazzed up about and reach out and give you a call? So one of the things and and what's interesting and and how I respond to that, Darren, is is from my background. I come from the industry. I worked for two manufacturers before getting into software, all in service parts. And I've worked with with manufacturers that have various levels of maturity or or sophistication, however you wanna call it. And I know that there's still a lot of people who who I used to in roles I used to be in that still do a lot of manual work, that still do a lot of spreadsheet work. A lot of access databases are out there. And what I would love to be able to do is help those customers get some advanced tools on the service supply chain side and the aftermarket side that their their production, brethren have always benefited from. That's just a little passion project of mine, and that's what I'm excited about and what I hope the reach and scope that GoEngineer has can provide. Excellent. So where would, where would most customers start? You've you've talked about, inventory. You talked about price. You mentioned a warranty product. But what's the what's the most logical starting point for a customer that's interested in improving their aftermarket business? Yeah. That's that's typically what we see when when I talk to customers is they'll have a hot button issue around one one or two of them, whether it's price parts pricing, whether it's inventory based on currently their current internal business pressures, what their current system landscape is, where they need to make an impact fast, and and and, get some quick success. So So most of our customers have an idea of where to start. What is really interesting is that most of our customers don't stop at one solution. So they'll either start on the inventory side or start on the parts pricing side. But a majority of our customers are what we call two solution customers. They will adopt that second solution over time because they appreciate Synchron's focus on the aftermarket side and the fact that we're it's an easy leap to work with a partner that knows the service supply chain side for both areas of business. Excellent. Well, our poll question, for those of you that have answered, it's interesting, because it's related to this next question. Many of you, spoke about the fact that you're using ERP currently to try and manage what, what we've been talking about today. And so the question that came up is, you know, we had a significant investment in ERP. We're using that as a way that we plan, our our aftermarket. Are you suggesting that we'd have to abandon our ERP solution or rip it out? Or or what are we doing with that in terms of adopting Synchron? No. No. In no ways that we're suggesting that. We need the ERPs or order manager systems, whatever you're using for your execution of your service operations to stay in place. We want to get a bunch of data from that. We want to send data back in terms of whether it's parts prices, whether it's order recommendations or transfers. I think the key here is to remember, and I think this is something that a lot of organizations know from the manufacturing side, there's been advanced tools on the manufacturing or the product side for years. It doesn't mean the replacement of the ERP. It makes making your business better and working with the ERP. We just want to help continue to bring that over to the service side because as everyone knows, an ERP is designed to do everything up to a certain level. It's probably not designed or they're not probably spending a lot of time focusing on the proper way to do parts pricing or how do we automate this transfer of material task for your service parts business. That's where Synchron spends all their time. We just wanna make your service operations work better through your ERP, if that makes Is it safe to say that Synchron actually will increase the value of the data that exists in your ERP? sense. Yeah. If we do our our job right and you're getting some of those benefits, then that information either going back to your ERP or used in conjunction with your ERP, the value of that will increase. Excellent. I I just closed out that one poll. There's another quick one. If you if you take ten seconds to answer it while we finish these questions out, that would be fantastic. Next question in the in the hopper here, Ben, is so how would a company go about starting a project with Synchron? What's involved in engaging you and and testing the solution out and getting something off the ground? Yeah. So probably the best way to do that is either go to syncron.com or reach out to you, Darren. And, typically, what would happen is we'd start a discovery process. We'd wanna know as much about your service operations as possible, where you're seeing pain points, what are your goals right now, how do they tie into your to your corporate goals, is the focus on improving margin right now, maybe we'll talk about parts pricing initially, Is the focus now you have too much inventory or your customers aren't happy with your availability? Then we probably focus on on parts the parts planning, solution with Synchron inventory. So the the key thing to get started is to start having some conversations with with Synchron and GoEngineer. Not a heavy lift to get get something off the ground and and start seeing some value. No. No. Depending upon, the availability of the information that we would have outside of your your ERP, we've had customers gain value pretty quickly, especially if they know exactly what they're looking for. Awesome. So is Synchron and I mentioned this at the beginning at from for OEMs and and trying to manage that aftermarket business. But is it is it only a product geared toward OEMs, or can dealer networks themselves benefit from the product? Yeah. So what's what's funny is Synchron originally started out just focused on on the, manufacturers and their service supply chains, but we've grown in the past and and have quite a few, not only dealerships using us, around the world for both our inventory solution and our price solution, but we've also got independent distributors that may not be affiliated with a manufacturer using our solution. Anyone that needs to either have a part on shelf or plan a price for a part is a good candidate, to take benefit from from Synchron Solutions. Last question that I see here at the moment. So our business is impacted by seasonality. Can Synchron help us better manage across different seasonal impacts or unanticipated disruptions? How quick. can it help you react to problems? Yeah. It it can. Synchron has a bunch of tools to our bunch of capabilities to help react to seasonal demand. Whether we're planning for that part on shelf, we can even if that an individual part doesn't, show seasonality, if the group of parts show seasonality, we can apply seasonality to an individual part. We've also got ways to handle that from a demand identification standpoint, and that's a great reason why you would want tools designed for, the aftermarket or designed for service parts operations? Because seasonality or and managing the difference between season seasonality demand or different break fix issues, is that something that you encounter on the manufacturing side where planning is is pretty linear, if that makes Yeah. Absolutely. Well, I I, again, appreciate you taking the time, to to talk to us today, Ben. And everyone that's on. the call, I appreciate you taking the time to listen. We're very excited about this partnership. It seems that as though several of you are thinking about tools that can help you in this space, might have initiatives coming up. Obviously, we wanna help you with that, so please don't hesitate to reach out. We'll bring the experts to the table. As Ben said, we'll go through a bit of a q and a session with you to learn a bit more about your business and then be able to quickly start to zero in on on where, where you have some low hanging fruit that we can help solve, how Synchron can do that, demonstrate the capability to you, and and talk about, any next steps that occur out of that. So, please don't hesitate to reach out. If you have any questions after the fact that pop up into your head, don't hesitate to send them out to us. We will be happy to get them answered. And I wanna thank you all again for taking the time today, and we'll see you on another session. We've got a lot of webinars on the site on different topics. Please don't hesitate to get up there, take a look, and register. Thanks again, and we'll talk to you all soon. Bye bye, everybody.