One of the tricks to identifying our actual MIF (Machines In Field) is to be able to ignore equipment we have sold and actually have under contract, if they were shipped out to a customer that is outside of our service area. When we pulled the Equipment counts for the Strategic Business survey’s, we counted all equipment under active contract at the ‘end’ period of the survey, or with a service record in a 12 month reporting period. BEI however, reports your MIF as equipment you’ve actually serviced yourself in the last 12 months. Both numbers are valid when you understand ‘how’ the number was calculated and also when you use them in the proper context (for example, BEI’s “MIF” is the best number to use when applied to any technician productivity or parts usages reports, and in certain Cost Per Copy reports (when they relate to your own service department). However, for certain financial reports and some Cost Per Copy reports, you need to consider all equipment under contract where you are collecting / spending dollars to support the equipment regardless of if the services are being delivered by your internal service department or not.
BEI can easily provide the ‘Serviced MIF’, and CEOJuice can provice both the ‘Serviced’ and ‘Contract’ MIF numbers, however trying to pull those numbers yourself from eautomate reports or eviews can be difficult at best.
What we suggest is to assign all our ShipOut equipment to a technician called ‘ShipOut’, and a Territory called ‘ShipOut’. That way anyone can easily filter to exclude/include that equipment from almost all eautomate reports.
For those who are not using BEI’s Territory Management tool (which I highly recommend), we have a process to help ensure your machines get assigned by someone to the appropriate technician and territory, ID171. The process works if you create a technician and a territory called ‘UnAssigned’ and you set those up as your company ‘Default’s for all new equipment / customer records created. When our alert 171 fires off, it will list out all ‘Host’ equipment that is still assigned to these ‘UnAssigned’ codes and report them to someone who can edit the records appropriately and assign them a valid tech/territory (of which some would be the ShipOut tech/territory codes you should use).
Interested in hearing other best practices that might be working at your dealership!
Mike
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