For Avaya, a global provider of telecommunications systems, managing and servicing networks for entire enterprises is a fast growing segment of its business. Customers range from small businesses and nonprofit agencies up to more than 90 percent of the companies in the Fortune 500, and the U.S. government. Reliability and fast response is the most critical element for this business with service level agreements (SLA) measured in minutes and hours. After being spun off from Lucent Technologies several years ago, Avaya was having difficulty meeting these demanding SLA standards, even with a relatively new service parts planning solution in place.

"Avaya was facing significant challenges," says Jeff Gardner, Avaya's director of aftermarket operations. "We needed to consolidate, gain better visibility and improve first-time fill rates across our expanding service parts network. The challenge was to find a better solution that would provide a platform for this consolidation. The solution needed to support our global business units, for both central and field stocking locations, and needed to easily integrate with our legacy systems and multiple enterprise resource planning instances."

After evaluating multiple software vendors, Avaya replaced its service parts planning solution with the Servigistics solution. It reportedly improved its client satisfaction level in less than six months after the quick 23-week implementation that covered its more than 500,000 maintenance contracts at 2,500 locations. More important, the Servigistics implementation included integration with multiple ERP instances, legacy systems and third-party logistics providers.

According to Gardner, the web-based Servigistics solution allowed Avaya to reduce inventory by 10 percent and to avoid $5m in repair costs. Avaya improved first-time fill-rates by 30 percent to 97 percent.

"Avaya has enjoyed an excellent return on our investment with the Servigistics service parts management solution," says Jeff Gardner. "Servigistics has made a significant impact on Avaya's supply chain efficiency and clearly helped us achieve our service-related goals.

He adds that the solution has enabled Avaya to rapidly execute on its vision of achieving global service parts management across all parts and locations, as well as to increase planner productivity and morale.

"The most important success is that we were able to improve overall client satisfaction in less than six months due to improved parts availability and Servigistics," says Gardner.