The emphasis on Lifecycle Management at Hanley Energy means the service doesn’t stop when the product is delivered. Hanley Energy’s in-house Service Department keeps communication lines open by tracking, anticipating and resolving issues to the highest industry standard.
Service and maintenance are key to ongoing business success at Hanley Energy. For Hanley Energy as a whole, keeping the customer operations up and running is just as important as selling the initial solution and overseeing installation.
Or as Edward Laverty, Global Head of Service, puts it, “We have a combined sense of purpose to support our customers to the highest level and honor the commitments we have made in our service level agreements (SLAs). We are customer-obsessed.”
Customers can call on the Hanley Energy in-house service team, who guarantee rapid response to critical incidents as part of their commitment to customer SLA’s. It’s a core proposition of Hanley Energy’s Lifecycle Management of each customer’s products.
From creation to critical: How the service department grew (and grows with) the business
Laverty joined Hanley Energy in 2019 as EMEA/APAC Service Manager, and came from an electronic engineering background. Since he assumed the role of ‘Global Head of Service’ within the Hanley Energy organization, he has overseen a team of Service Managers, Service Support Engineers and Service Co-Ordinators covering all regions globally. This international team incorporates:
- EMEA/APAC region headquarters in Ireland
- AMER region headquarters in Virginia (US East Coast)
- US West Coast offices in Oregon
- US Central offices in Ohio, and
- Sweden and Australian country offices.
It’s a global team of world-class engineers who are crucial to Hanley Energy’s record of innovation in Critical Power and Energy Management.
The Service Team supports the smooth operation of mission-critical solutions that sit at the core of Hanley Energy’s business. The ambition is to deliver secure and reliable power from the grid all the way to the Hyperscale Data Center IT rack. But it’s not just about delivering a one-time solution. As trusted advisors and partners, Hanley Energy’s service team guide customers through the challenges of technology transformation, empowering them to realise the operational efficiencies underpinned by Service and Maintenance, and Lifecycle Management.
Hanley Energy takes enormous pride in keeping its customers’ businesses running. Our industry-leading standards of end-to-end service – including 100% response time – empower our clients to effectively manage their energy strategy and optimize their operational competitiveness.
Recent feedback from a VoC (Voice of the Customer) initiative by Hanley Energy echoes this, “Hanley Energy’s service and maintenance teams exemplify excellence. Their dedication, expertise, and prompt response have consistently exceeded our expectations. They are crucial to our operational success, ensuring our systems run seamlessly.”
How Hanley Energy delivers superior service
The company values of Service Excellence, Quality, Innovation and Partnership provide the foundation for the service team engineers. For many customers, the service team are the incarnation of everything Hanley Energy represents – in action, on the ground, and always at the end of the line in an emergency providing essential technical support and alleviating any customer concerns for the problem at hand prior to deployment to site, or even possibly issuing Hanley Energy ‘Engineering Notices’ or FSB (Field Service Bulletins) to customer senior personnel.
The standards that Laverty sets and upholds for his team go beyond the industry average, and the benchmarks are objectively best in class:
- 100% response time as per SLAs across all products
- 100% service renewal rate
- Rapid response within 2 or 4 hours (SLA’s agreed with customers)
- 24/7, 365-day emergency support globally. Hanley Energy ensures that an engineer will get back to the customer within 15 minutes of a call to the helpline.
Achieving and maintaining these standards stems from attention to detail and consistency. Laverty is unequivocal. “Lifecycle Management is the key to our success at Hanley Energy,” he says. “It means we can track the configuration of our products from the very first test in the factory to every single instance during the lifecycle of that product.” For any panel or component, customers can access detailed records and information through serial number tracking.
How Hanley Energy grew from a team of “two-and-a-half” to customer obsession on a global scale
READ THE STORY
How Lifecycle Management enhances service value for the customer
Customers can manage preventive maintenance, troubleshooting and critical incident resolution with their own in-house team, but Hanley Energy offers Master Service Agreements and Service Support Contracts as an enticing alternative.
It’s never too late to reach back out to the Hanley Energy team. “We never leave a customer idle,” Laverty stresses. “We respond as quickly as possible, we resolve it, and we issue a detailed technical report.”
It usually takes only one incident for most customers to realize that warranty cover alone is insufficient, and to make the decision to upgrade to a service contract. With that comes peace of mind that out-of-hours or weekend issues can be addressed in a short turnaround site visit to get their unit back online, first time.
With the service contract, customers receive tracking of all instances that have happened on a particular unit, supported by part number and serial number tracking on every product that is then integrated into a callout database and service scheduling tool.
Root Cause Analysis
As part of the Lifecycle Management process, the service team will perform root cause analysis on parts, whether they are inside or outside warranty.
Once service engineers have tested to confirm that the problem is not with a Hanley Energy panel, they will pinpoint where the actual fault lies and alert the relevant third party. No quick fixes happen without careful analysis, thorough checks, and clear communication.
“If an issue is outside of our panel, we’ll fix it if we can,” says Laverty. “We don’t have a ‘not my panel’ mentality, although we’ll be conscious of touching another vendor’s equipment.”
“If another vendor engineer is required on site, our own engineer will remain until they arrive. We’re building good relationships with other vendors who can be confident in our troubleshooting skills. Ultimately, it’s taking headaches away from the customer.”
What to expect from your dedicated service team
Hanley Energy’s “processes are tailored specifically to individual customers, their preferences and the regions they operate from,” enabling the team to provide our global customers in all regions with a reliable service. It’s a global strategy with a local footprint, using a flexible deployment model to support our customer base.
The service contract and the SLAs contained within ensure that the customer benefits from complete product Lifecycle Management that covers:
- Planned and coordinated corrective and preventive maintenance
- Tracked quality performance of products and components
- Failure category analysis and Root Cause Analysis (RCA) reporting
“Initially we had to grow to meet the customer demand,” says Laverty. “Now we’re thinking 12 months down the line to ensure product knowledge and assigning appropriate resource in advance to forward plan for the new products being introduced.”
“If you’re doing the same thing that you did five years ago, that’s not the way to be doing business,” Laverty explains. “You’ve got to be coming up with better ideas for customers and continually improving processes and procedures.”
Seamless collaboration between subject matter experts, sales, and design teams means, “we’re more than prepared to have the structures in place once the product is manufactured and delivered to the site,” according to Laverty. “We join the commissioning and installation phase so that we’re aware of any issues and we know of all the changes in software and design so that we’re well prepared for when the product is handed over to the customer, and can advise on the necessary critical spare parts.”
Anticipating supply chain issues is another important feature of regional teams working as one. “If we know that a component is coming to the end of its life, we highlight this on our customer meetings and work with our Design and Procurement teams to get ahead of the curve with a new solution.”
Service customers can count on
For customers, installation is only the beginning of the relationship. As Laverty says, “All the good work Hanley Energy does is based on how we address an emergency callout as opposed to what we did on an install two or three years earlier.”
By extension, there’s no room for complacency. “We’re only as good as our last job,” he adds.
In an emergency situation with a customer anxious to see when their panel is going to be back online and at what cost, that’s arguably the attitude that gives peace of mind.
It’s a team that is only a phone call away and on its way, no matter the time of day.
