Helping a Heavy Equipment Manufacturer Quantify Global Competitive Value

Situation:

A leading heavy equipment manufacturer believes that it offers a line of products with quality that is far superior to that of its competition. However, it was struggling to quantify the value associated with this quality differential from a customer’s perspective. This client was interested in understanding how quality impacts overall product perception for a wide range of product types. Further, this client is a global competitor and hypothesized that quality would have varying degrees of impact in each geographic market served including North America, Latin America, Europe, Middle East and Asia Pacific.

‍

Objectives:

• Measure current satisfaction on a product and component level
• Identify the number of failures that occurred during the first 12 months of ownership for a specific machine serial number
• Determine likelihood of repurchase and recommendation
• Identify perceived market leaders with details regarding differentiation factors

‍

Ducker’s Approach:

• Conduct 5,000 interviews annually with end users of target machine models that purchased new machines within a given time range
• Include client’s customers as well as end users of competitive brands
• Collect detailed information regarding specific failures that occurred within the first 12 months of ownership
• Regression modeling to understand the impact of specific types of failures on product satisfaction and brand loyalty

‍

Outcome:

Ducker Worldwide prioritized product improvement initiatives based on satisfaction and loyalty impact and targeted market campaigns which leveraged competitive advantages over competitors. Ducker determined that through parts inventory planning – frequent problems with significant impact on satisfaction may require inventory increases to decrease downtime. In addition, Ducker identified that supplier performance indicator – components failing frequently may require supplier development initiatives. This lead to Dealer training initiatives developed to support dealers in quickly correcting high-risk failures.