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This blog post was co-authored with Shivaraman Venkatraman (Global Customer Success Manager), Anita Tasheva (Offer Design Expert), and Leonda S (Customer Value Analyst).
Schneider Electric’s Quarterly Service Report empowers customers to make informed decisions about maintenance and asset management
There’s a constant stream of data flowing around us which we never see. From WiFi signals to satellites and undersea cables, information surrounds us like the atmosphere of Earth.
Some of that constantly moving data comes from the Internet of Things (IoT). Smart devices, like the electrical assets that Schneider Electric monitors, are continuously beaming performance data back to HQ.
In fact, there’s so much information that it’s impossible for one person to process.
Enter the Quarterly Service Report: a few short pages that summarize all the data you need to know about the electrical infrastructure and assets in your service plan.
We sat down with Shivaraman Venkatraman, Anita Tasheva, Leonda S. to find out what the Quarterly Service Report includes – and how you can get the most value from it.
What is a quarterly service report?
Your Quarterly Service Report (QSR) is like an executive summary of Schneider Electric’s monitoring data for your service plan*. It tells you how assets are performing, records any important incidents, and recommends maintenance actions.
“This is the value that we bring,” says Shivaraman Venkatraman, Global Customer Success Leader at Schneider Electric. “It helps the customer to plan maintenance and optimize the allocation of resources, manpower, and capital costs.”
Maintenance strategy optimization can significantly impact businesses. Our internal studies show that condition-based maintenance can reduce electrical failure risk and unplanned downtime by up to 75%. Additionally, it can reduce on-site activities and planned downtime costs by up to 40% – if you have the data to make it work.
Quarterly Service Reports are produced three times a year. Once a year, the Service Report is replaced with a more detailed Summary Report. This can include fine-grained data for individual assets, such as:
- Health index
- Maintenance index
- Electrical fire index
- Partial discharge index
- Advanced transformer oil monitoring
The information in your Summary Report might vary depending on whether your company has an Essential, Advanced, or Advanced+ EcoCare* plan. Advanced+ customers get extra data in their Quarterly Service Reports, too.
But the most important elements of the QSR are the same for everyone.
Schneider Electric’s Connected Services Hub Experts
Each report is generated by an expert from Schneider Electric’s Connected Services Hub (CSH), using data from every asset during the past three months. Next, you’ll have the chance to discuss the report and recommendations with the Customer Success Management team (CSM).
How to read your quarterly service report
Customer and Schneider Electric Customer Success Manager review the Quarterly Service Report together
For the experts at Schneider Electric, every data signal from every asset is fascinating. But if you’re focused on outcomes – such as more cost-effective monitoring or maintenance – then you don’t need to see every last percentage, matrix, and decimal place.
“Maybe not everybody is interested in going through the complete report,” says Leonda S, Customer Value Analyst. “The executive summary helps customers to understand their sites on a high level.”
The most essential information in the report covers:
- The global health of your assets.
- Critical events.
- Insights into your systems.
- Recommendations for maintenance.
Let’s take a closer look at those sections.
Global health level
The global health level gives an overview of customer assets. It doesn’t get into specific data for each asset.
Instead, it scores them on a matrix which shows their asset health and how critical they are to the system. The scores are colour-coded, so you can see trends at a glance.
Event summaries
In this section, CSH agents add a summary of any important incidents which happened during the quarter.
Schneider Electric’s monitoring platform uses algorithms and data thresholds to automatically flag any anomalies or incidents. However, you won’t see every single incident listed here. This section only describes incidents which are critically relevant.
For example, let’s say a single asset goes over its temperature threshold at midday during a hot summer. A few hours later, it’s back to normal. That incident won’t be listed in the Quarterly Service Report because it’s easily explained.
But what if another asset had repeated temperature spikes in the middle of winter, without explanation? It’s not easily explained, and it could have an impact on performance over time, so it would be listed in the report.
Insights
The Insights section is where you’ll find analysis of patterns and trends in the data. It can also include an analysis of monitoring performance, such as the connection quality of Schneider Electric’s monitoring systems.
Recommendations
The most important section of the Quarterly Service Report comes last: maintenance recommendations.
CSH agents use monitoring data, event summaries and insights to make their recommendations. But there’s a healthy dose of expert knowledge involved, too.
“These are not automatic recommendations”, says Anita Tasheva, Offer Design Expert at Schneider Electric. “These are recommendations made by experts. They’re different from other reports which are just automatic and based on analytics.”
The recommendations in Quarterly Service Reports often go beyond basic maintenance. They get to the heart of performance issues and can help avoid problems later.
For example, Leonda S remembers working with one customer who had a problem with high temperature alarms. The alarms were regularly being tripped, but the cause wasn’t clear.
A digital services expert from Schneider Electric went deep into the alarm history and realized the issue was linked to harmonic limits. The report recommended a harmonic study – which, sure enough, found that a filter should be installed.
“Without [Schneider Electric’s] digital services, they would not have identified the issue,” says Leonda. “After installing the harmonic filter, the frequent tripping won’t happen. The equipment ageing is restricted, so the customer improves operational efficiency as well as savings.”
Get more from your quarterly service report
The Quarterly Service Report can help you streamline maintenance, plan ahead, and reduce costs in the long term. Here’s how you can maximize those benefits.
- Make time to go through the report with your Customer Success Manager so that they can discuss insights and recommendations with you.
- Be proactive on maintenance recommendations so that they don’t show up in the next report as critical incidents.
- Look for patterns across different sites. For Shivaraman, spotting patterns across sites for global customers is a big part of his job. “We tell [customers] the nature of the repeat issues… so they can prioritize them in their planning,” he explains.
Find out how EcoCare members are increasing their uptime and reducing their maintenance costs with expert advice from our Quarterly Service Reports.
* Please verify the availability of EcoCare in your region through a local services sales representative. If EcoCare is not yet available, you can start leveraging EcoStruxure Service Plan.
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