Entercoms Issued Key Patent for Managing Service Part Substitutions in Aftermarket Service and Support Industry

New patent solidifies company dominance in managing service parts supply chains for meeting service commitments while reducing excess inventory

IRVING, Texas, May 6, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Entercoms, Inc., a leading provider of solutions for aftermarket and post-sales service supply chains, today announced it was issued U.S. Patent No. 10,262,297 entitled "Part Chain Management in an Aftermarket Services Industry" by the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). The official issue date was April 16, 2019 and can be searched here: http://patft.uspto.gov/netahtml/PTO/index.html.

Customers increasingly expect manufacturers to support their products over their entire useful life, far beyond the end of the manufacturing run. The ability to use part substitutes is key to ensuring life cycle support. The manufacturer must be able to maintain part chain relationships – logical relationships between substitute service parts – across multiple product generations in order to effectively provide service and support over the entire product life cycle.

If part substitution relationships are not maintained or used optimally, companies risk building excess inventory of the wrong spare parts and expose themselves to missing customer service level agreements, which negatively impacts working capital, warranty reserves and customer loyalty. For instance, if the company cannot find an effective service part substitute to fulfill a support request, it may have to upgrade the customer to a new product, which can be very expensive.

With patented technology, Entercoms is able to optimize the supply of substitute spare parts by creating complete part substitutional relationships directly from raw information contained in Engineering Data Management systems. Using graph theory-based algorithms, it can infer one-way and two-way substitutions that may not be readily apparent, then discover and automatically fix any substitution conflicts. Further, it can analyze substitution information to generate optimized part chain sequences so that the right parts can be procured and used to fill service needs.

"We live in a service economy where an ever-increasing percentage of revenues and profits of companies come from products that customers already own," said Dr. Rahul Singh, CEO and co-founder of Entercoms. "This patent highlights key data modeling capabilities that will be needed for companies to increase customer satisfaction while reducing their total cost of service while shows our commitment to helping our clients optimize their service and spare parts supply chains through analytics."

About Entercoms

Based in Irving, TX, Entercoms is a leading provider of solutions for aftermarket and service driven supply chains. Serving customers in industries such as Technology, Industrial, Oil & Gas, Mobility, Point-of-Sale and Manufacturing, Entercoms helps its customers support their end customers by optimizing their service supply chains and driving high asset availability and uptime. Entercoms provides solutions such as Process Control Towers and Customer 360 for visibility and action ready insights, and modular applications for process automation, execution and planning. Entercoms' BPaaS (Business Process as a Service) delivery model combines cloud-based SaaS solutions augmented by deep domain expertise in order to deliver measurable business outcomes for its clients, often in 90 days or less. Learn more at https://www.entercoms.com.

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