MacGregor
case study
Speed, availability, and price are key factors in guaranteeing success in the spare parts business.
MacGregor is a trusted innovator in the maritime industry, helping shipowners and operators maximise effi ciency, safety, and sustainability. With solutions that serve vessels for decades, MacGregor’s mission is to create lifetime value for customers across the entire lifecycle of their ships. Taitopilvi is helping MacGregor to use product data more eff ectively and streamline spare parts lookup during ordering – which supports MacGregor’s strategic focus on services. “Taitopilvi’s work will make us more relevant to our customers by speeding up how fast we can respond to inquiries. They worked as a strategic partner who understands our business needs in addition to having a deep understanding of technology.”
– Aki Sand, Vice President, Spare Parts, MacGregor
The challenge
MacGregor off ers a wide range of lifting equipment for vessels, which means managing spare parts information in multiple systems for the whole portfolio was getting unwieldy. But customer expectations for B2B sales have changed – most customers expect to be able to easily and quickly fi nd the parts they need and to get responses to inquiries in hours, not days. In order to speed up response times and enable new digital services, MacGregor had to fi rst improve the quality of their spare parts product data. They also needed to make identifi cation of all the spare parts they off er easier, which number about 1.7 million in total.
The solution
We completed two separate projects that helped solve MacGregor’s challenges. The fi rst was the creation of an aggregating product data enhancement tool that fosters a collaborative approach to improve data quality. This tool allows people in the company to easily and systematically update, inspect, and maintain product data – while also addressing issues with potential duplicates and erroneous master data. The second project was about crafting a spare parts identifi cation tool. This was needed because MacGregor off ers a huge amount of spare parts for their equipment. We created a concept and a prototype to show how an AI service can scan dispersed legacy documentation from various fi le formats and automatically pick out the relevant details about spare parts. The service can enrich information from transactional data in order to create a usable, structured dataset for end users – making it easier to identify the right spare part in the future.
The benefits
MacGregor now has a more unifi ed and cleaned-up spare parts product dataset and tools to continue improving it. MacGregor also has the proof-of-concept to move forward with a tool to make it easier to fi nd the right parts for any given customer’s installation. High-quality and structured data consumed in the correct user contexts will be the key to responding to customer inquiries quickly and delivering services that can better meet customer needs in the modern digital era.
Services used
Qualitative research, Process modeling, Service design, UX design, Rapid prototyping, Architecture design, Web development, API development & integrations, CI/CD, DevOps, Scrum, ML & AI.
