Build or partner - POC & validation

My role at MachineMax requires continuous exploration and inquisitiveness. As Head of Product and Design, I must identify new opportunities and areas of growth for the product - both the software and the hardware. Identifying opportunities, product market fit, and business viability requires a focused approach and an understanding that not all opportunities will success. Carving out time within the team to work on proof of concepts is critical to innovative and continuous product development.

I’ll share one of the software POCs I ran.

The goal

To understand the workflow for maintenance; preventative, planned, predictive, and reactive. And the relationships between dealers, rental providers and end customers when managing maintenance. 

To identify the opportunity (customer need, financial, data access) for MachineMax to invest time in building out a module on maintenance. 

The discovery

We spoke to relevant stakeholders in 6 companies across; UK, USA, South Africa, and the DRC

Research identified 6 key use problems

• Cost - Downtime costs a lot of money but there is no accurate way to measure the impact

• Poor visibility - inability to find machines on site can lead to delays and cause safety incident

• Lack of skillset - it’s too expensive to train engineers in hours, therefore it is often outsourced

• Culture & Adoption - there is no design to change the current process

• Missed revenue opportunities - dealers could be doing more to manage the process and create more business opportunities for themselves

• Lack of technology - processes are manual and mistakes are made in documentation

Complex relationships and many personas mean there is no single way maintenance in managed and many conflicting view on what is required to improve the process.

The outcome

There was definitely an opportunity in the market which aligned with out vision and our company goals. Two options were presented to the business; build or partner. Given the size of team, the existing priorities, and the need to get to market quickly we pushed to partner in the first instance to test as a proof of concept. Partnering with an existing maintenance management company not only provided a solution for our existing customer but also opened our product up to new markets and led to additional unplanned revenue growth. The POC is seeing unplanned downtime reduce by up to 15% through the integrations set up between our platform which pulls data from our hardware (tracking activity and hours), and a partner software solution.

Next steps?

1. Grow product offering through enhanced integration capabilities - specifically API product development

2. Source additional partners and build an ecosystem for plug and play maintenance management.