Last mile case management: video & highlights

Last mile case management

Don’t let limited connectivity keep you from tracking case statuses and monitoring recurring maintenance issues in the field! Iluméxico is a social enterprise providing solar energy to rural communities throughout rural Mexico – targeting households who live on $1/day.  In addition to tracking 7 types of sales and logging monthly visits to users, they’re using TaroWorks to track their last mile case management of 6,500 solar systems through 9 major regions, and growing.

Manuel Andrade, Iluméxico’s COO, shared their story of how they’re using TaroWorks and Salesforce to log issues, coordinate different roles to resolve the issue, and analyze reports in order to make operations smoother in the long run. Below are the highlights of their story, but click on the recording to see and hear for yourself!

Highlights

Effects of Maintenance Issues

Iluméxico was tracking data through pen and paper prior to TaroWorks. With that system, they had a lack of quality error tracking and visibility, average case processing times of up to 2 months, a loss of payments on products that aren’t working, and a loss of potential customers if they saw faulty devices.

Case Management 1.0

To resolve a Case, they need to coordinate 3 main roles within Iluméxico. These roles include the field officer who reports the issue with TaroWorks, the Operations Director who routes the message to the right Quality and Manufacturing Facility who resolve the issue.

They currently track 3 levels of manufacturing errors:

• Product (i.e. the PRO 15)
• Component (i.e. issue is with the solar panel)
• Type of failure (i.e. cable)

They created an Excel matrix to map each issue combination, which was loaded into TaroWorks as a Cascading Select question in the Quality Report survey, so field officers always log issues in a standard way.

Quality Report data creates a Case in Salesforce

When field staff notice a quality issue on a site visit, they’ll fill out the Quality Report form in TaroWorks. They log the type of issue, add additional information about the case, and take a photo. Once they sync TaroWorks, a Case record is generated in Salesforce, and the Operations Director is automatically notified by email that a new Case has been created. The manufacturing team will log their solution, and close the Case.

Results and Impacts

In the 12 months they’ve started case management, Iluméxico has gotten visibility into their issues using Dashboards in Salesforce. They quickly saw that most issues were around panel cables and missing installation materials like screws and nails.

“These could be corrected super easy and super fast, but we didn’t have visibility before.”

Outcomes, and changes they’ve implemented, from the past 12 months of increased visibility:

• Introduced production and packaging standards for their manufacturing plants
• Decentralized packaging to the branches. Instead of manufacturing centers sending everything in one package and risking missing supplies, they now send separate boxes of each component (i.e. panels, screws, nails) and the packaging takes place at the branches, so they have spare parts handy.
• Instituted a new way of cabling for their panels
• Total number of cases created decreased even while they added more branches

Case Management 2.0 and Next Steps

Though they’ve seen great results so far, Iluméxico’s starting to think about how to improve their case management even more – to start tracking service cases (i.e. installation errors), and to automate even more of their process (routing issues to experts,  to the right people so 80% of their process is automated).

Do you have experience with successful case management? Or are you hoping to implement a case management system with your operations? Let us know how we can help!