MaintenanceNet makes available whitepaper on service lifecycle management 4 August, 2008 By Vanessa Ho

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"The white paper goes into talking about the lifecycle of management of not just your services but your assets as a whole and how to use that in an intelligent way by mining your existing customer base and take these traditional one-time service sales and turn them into an annuity business as well as really grow a deeper relationship with your customer," said Scott Herron, CEO of MaintenanceNet.

He added best-practice lifecycle management practices set the stage for dramatic increases in top- and bottom-line revenue.

Herron said the white paper also focuses on the challenges that the supply chain and manufacturers have today of not performing at optimum for managing the service opportunity. Some of the challenges that partners in this area face is getting renewal notifications out on time and getting it in a proactive manner out to customers. Also a challenge is managing all of the customer assets and services that they sell.

"There is a focus today amongst VARs who primarily sell hardware and solutions [that] sometimes they are not looking at these existing service opportunities and really focusing on them as a revenue opportunity," he added.

The white paper, entitled "Service360: A Comprehensive New Approach to Service Contract Lifecycle Management" outlines why partners should register, renew and refresh their products and services.

Herron explained that if partners register their services, they can renew them. "If you don't register, you are never going to have a renewal opportunity."

Once a partner does renew, they can then do a refresh of the technology or service when it has run its course.

"That is the positioning we are trying to put out in the market with channel partners to let them know there are multiple selling opportunities with whatever you sell and if you manage it correctly, you can add several revenue opportunities against a single transaction, said Herron.

The renewal process is a challenge because often partners don't register the product or service properly in the first place. This results in the manufacturing partner not having any record or receiving incomplete information that leads to them not knowing who to send the renewal notice to.

"We are here to educate the channel, make sure they register, renew and refresh those technologies and provide a suite of tools to help partners better manage [their product and service lifecycle management]," Herron said.

One such tool is MaintenanceNet's Service360 platform that helps channel partners register, renew and refresh. Herron explained that Service 360 not only brings the application layer to channel partners but they can also take care of the data management issue by making sure information is registered correctly and has the appropriate service type and appropriate hardware asset while partners get those notifications in a timely and proactive manner.