“Saving time is also saving money”: Why Nerliens Meszansky adopted Evatic to manage its service operations

Oslo-based Nerliens Meszansky AS is a leading supplier of laboratory equipment whose origins can be traced back over 100 years. The company’s product portfolio is wide and ranges from clinical diagnostic and pathology equipment to bio reactor systems and materials testing. Its customer base in Norway is also broad and covers industrial and private laboratories, universities, healthcare companies and institutions, scientific research organisations and even defence establishments.

Clearly, accuracy is a key factor for Nerliens’ customers and so their equipment requires regular maintenance and, of course, there is also sometimes the need for servicing and repair. The company has a network of 17 engineers, based mainly in the Oslo region, to support its customers. Until 2017, Nerliens managed its customer service function using Excel, the SuperOffice CRM system and the Visma accounting system. Clearly, this made it hard to get a centralised overview of the operation, made it difficult to manage and also involved a number of manual processes. Nerliens wanted to achieve much better visibility of its support operation and also needed to be able to provide its customers with quick and accurate information.

The company decided to implement Evatic because it gave them detailed information on the status and performance of their service agreements. Importantly, they needed to be able to give their customers real-time updates on the progress of site visits and also provide a variety of machine- or customer-specific checklists to demonstrate that all the required work and checks had been carried out. Besides looking for the operational efficiencies that Evatic could bring them, Nerliens also sought a more strategic view, so that they could assess aspects such as the profit from customers or groups of customers or the time spent on various different tasks or types of task.

As a result of having implemented Evatic, Nerliens’ customers now receive both a service report and a completed checklist, as soon as an engineer has completed their visit. This is achieved by using the Evatic mobile app. At the same time, because of the integration between Evatic and the Visma accounting system, if there is a specific purchase order for the job, then the invoice is raised automatically and dispatched to the appropriate address. Evatic also now gives Nerliens detailed control over its various types of service agreement, so that there is clarity regarding who should be invoiced for what and, equally, who should not be invoiced!

As Arne Kampesæter, Nerliens’ Service Manager explains, with full integration between their Visma system and Evatic, their operations are made significantly more efficient “We have three different order types and this is all handled automatically and seamlessly by the Evatic and Visma set up.” Arne emphasises that the time savings from implementing Evatic and making the necessary integrations have been crucial: “The integrations that Evatic offered were of critical importance to us when we were looking for a new service management system. Without Evatic, some tasks would take twice as long and ‘saving time is also saving money’”.

In terms of the future, Nerliens know that relatively few of their customers currently use the Evatic customer portal. However, they are hoping to encourage their customers to make greater use of this facility, which gives customers full visibility into the service history of their equipment, as well as being able to order service visits and manage some of the details regarding their equipment and their own contacts themselves.