Optimizing Service Excellence: Georg Fischer's journey

Georg Fischer, established in 1802, spans across 34 countries with 137 companies worldwide. 

Within the Georg Fischer Corporation, GF Machining Solutions (GFMS) stands as a specialized division, offering comprehensive machining solutions tailored to its clientele. Boasting a workforce exceeding 3,500 individuals, GFMS delivers an extensive array of services, covering Milling, EDM, Laser, Spindles, Tooling, Automation, and Customer Service. Globally, there are approximately 60,000 active machines from GFMS in operation.

With an extensive global sales and service network, GFMS prioritizes customer satisfaction. The company operates through 20 sales entities and employs around 550 field service engineers across the globe. These teams ensure localized sales, service, and application support, with primary support provided in over 20 languages. Annually, they handle over 100,000 tickets, showcasing GFMS’s commitment to exceptional customer service on a global scale.

GFMS is committed to enhancing the service quality of its machining solutions by streamlining daily operations. Recognizing that easy access to technical expertise and information is vital for both customers and service organizations, GFMS aims to empower them by ensuring seamless accessibility. 

 

To achieve this objective, GFMS has identified the need for a comprehensive knowledge management system that consolidates disparate data sources. This system must be accessible across various functional departments within the organization. As a result, GFMS has made the strategic decision to implement a support services system to facilitate this unified access to information and streamline operations effectively.

• Facilitate the sharing and reuse of data within the company, leveraging insights from both the central organization (official documentation) and field service engineers (daily customer support feedback).
• Continuously analyze and enhance existing knowledge resources over time.

This solution aims to empower internal staff across three continents by providing effortless access to technical documentation, ticketing systems, and product metadata. It promotes seamless knowledge sharing and collaboration, transcending geographical boundaries and language barriers.

The search solution developed by ELCA integrates multilingual support, natural language processing, personal data redaction and learning features powered by Language Studio models. Additionally, it includes machine taxonomy information, synonyms dictionaries, and real-time translation. For enhanced accessibility, it provides an API and web access.

• Improving Operational Efficiency and Global Collaboration

The solution enables comprehensive query handling, ensuring users receive authorized, translated and contextually relevant responses, while facilitating continuous learning and improvement. The field engineers now benefit from the combination of central documentation and the insights of other field engineers around the world, transcending geographical and language barriers. This capability is crucial for multinational companies seeking to maximize the efficiency of their globally distributed teams.

• Customer satisfaction and loyalty for long term success

By adopting a solution that provides quick and easy access to the necessary information, GFMS improves ticket resolution and therefore customer satisfaction. Georg Fischer can now serve more customers with the same force of field engineers. The customers benefit from faster and better issue resolutions by empowered field engineers. And they will soon see their direct access to information also boosted through its integration with the solution.

• Technical Solution with Cutting-Edge Technologies

The technical solution leverages advanced technologies (including cloud and Azure AI services) to ensure sophisticated query processing and response capabilities. These technologies provide the flexibility necessary for the system to evolve with the changing needs of the organization, including ongoing integration of GenAI backed business applications.

• Expertise in designing, developing, and deploying solutions using Azure AI Services directly within the customer's Azure environment. 
• Collaborative partnership with the customer's Product Owner to define and prioritize crucial features of the solution, ensuring alignment with business objectives. 
• Dedicated support to the customer's IT team to seamlessly integrate source systems with the solution. 
• Implementation of an agile project methodology with a fixed-price approach, drawing upon resources from both onshore and offshore locations for optimal efficiency and cost-effectiveness. 
• Assisted the customer's IT department in defining and establishing its initial landing zone for an Azure project, laying a solid foundation for future initiatives.

This success story illustrates how a company can modernize its IT systems using knowledge management and AI technologies to increase operational efficiency, improve services, and enhance customer satisfaction, thereby remaining competitive in a globalized market.