Articles

Capacity Planning to Increase Mechanic Availability in After-Sales Service at PT. Elang

After-sales service is critical in selling products such as heavy equipment, which require maintenance from mechanics who understand the product. PT. Elang is one of Indonesia’s heavy equipment distributors and provides service support after purchase. The company currently struggles to manage the mechanics for repair requests from customers. Most of the time, the mechanics are already dispatched for regular maintenance, so repair requests are challenging to respond quickly to because of the unpredictable nature of the case. Complaints and bad reviews on after-sales service lead to lost customers and significant revenue loss. This study aims to identify the gap between current and ideal capacity, look for the root causes through the business process review to find where improvement is needed and provide a suitable solution for the company. The qualitative and quantitative methods were used in this study. The qualitative method was through interviews and discussions with the head of service support and the branch operation head to understand the situation and process. The business process related to the issue was then analysed with Business Process Modeling and Notation (BPMN) and the root cause was found using the Current Reality Tree (CRT) method. The quantitative method was through the sales and capacity data collected from the company. The best alternative solution was selected using the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) using XLSTAT. This study showed that the problem happened because of two root causes: an inadequate number of mechanics and no sufficient integrated system to support the information flow through related divisions. Three alternative solutions were proposed based on the root causes. After the AHP calculation and analysis, the results were confirmed with the head of service support, and it was concluded that the solution that could be implemented in the company is providing service points with a priority result of 71.03%. The next alternative is to implement the cloud ERP system with a result of 15.04% and outsource mechanics with a result of 13.93%. With this solution, the company considered a long-term approach with more sustainability and scalability criteria than ease of implementation. The order of criteria priorities are cost, effectiveness, sustainability, scalability, and ease of implementation, with a consecutive result of 47.87%, 24.3%, 12.64%, 6.6%, and 8.59%.