It takes a rare combination of vision, market awareness, and grit to evangelize a company that delivers never-before-seen products and services. With no rule book to read and no precedent to follow, it could take decades to create new categories of technology, develop supporting processes and infrastructure, and build an unrivaled company on those foundations.
This vision has been realized in Decisiv, a company which is revolutionizing asset service and maintenance operations for the global commercial vehicle market through its cloud-based Service Relationship Management (SRM) platform. Since its initial introduction, the platform has evolved from simply streamlining service events to become the largest asset service ecosystem in the industry, connecting and uniting leading equipment and component manufacturers; fleet owners, managers, and operators; service provider networks; and other key players. To date, the Decisiv SRM Ecosystem has managed more than 17 million service events and serves over 40,000 users and 7 million assets across more than 4,800 service locations across North America.
Hyatt and his team discovered that the industry’s disjointed approach to servicing commercial vehicles was costing asset owners and fleets millions of dollars a year.
Dick Hyatt, Decisiv’s CEO and President, has driven the creation, growth and ongoing evolution of the company. Hyatt is no stranger to building and leading early-stage technology companies, having held senior executive positions or led five start-ups throughout his career. As Decisiv’s chief evangelist he is quick to note that it takes both a shared and relentless company focus to drive the company’s vision of transforming how every commercial asset on the planet is acquired, managed, and serviced.
The commercial vehicle space – which can be largely categorized into light-duty, medium-duty, and heavy-duty commercial vehicle markets, as well as off-highway vehicles and equipment – has always glimmered with opportunity in Hyatt’s eyes. “Prior to the early 2000s, the service supply chain for maintaining commercial assets and the interaction between all the different constituents was disconnected,” he says. “The information that was available during a service event was siloed, with all of the participants in a service event transmitting and recording information individually – in untracked phone calls, scrawled on notepads, or at best, keyed into their internal systems. It was difficult to streamline communication. The net result was excessive downtime, lack of transparency, and unmanaged cost.”
Hyatt and his team discovered that the industry’s disjointed approach to servicing commercial vehicles was costing asset owners and fleets millions of dollars a year. An equally critical problem was that manufacturers had little or no direct connection to their customers and their service experience. “Each service event was typically taking more than six days to complete and costing the asset owner $2,000 in lost revenue per out-of-service day,” Hyatt notes. “Of that service time, only 20 percent was actually spent working on the asset and the rest was lost on inefficiencies like typing the same information multiple times into several different portals, trying to decipher poorly transcribed paper inspection forms, waiting for faxes to come through, making phone calls to track down missing information, and getting approvals to do the work. In total, many billions of dollars of lost revenue resulted from an inefficient, disconnected service supply chain in North America alone.”
“When you’re starting something that’s never been done before it takes time for your anchor tenants to buy in and recognize the value, but eventually they do.”
Connectivity: The Heart of the Ecosystem
It was 2001. Between connected vehicles and cloud computing, the available technologies had reached a point where Hyatt knew he could put them to work to achieve the connectivity that was so sorely lacking in the commercial vehicle service space. “That was the transformative opportunity that drove us to build Decisiv,” he says.
In fact, Hyatt describes the 20 years since he founded Decisiv as a series of transformative opportunities. Some, such as finding industry partners to join the Decisiv SRM Ecosystem and drive the solution forward, took more time and nurturing. “When you’re starting something that’s never been done before it takes time for your anchor tenants to buy in and recognize the value, but eventually they did,” he says. “Class 6 through 8 vehicle manufacturers were our go-to-market partners. Our first partner was Volvo Trucks, and when they joined the Ecosystem, they brought their dealer networks, connected vehicles, backend systems, call centers, and customers. Today, we have most of the North American commercial vehicle manufacturers and their service networks and assets on our platform.”
Other opportunities that have driven Decisiv’s growth and the evolution of the SRM Ecosystem have been more rapid and pronounced. “There has been a dramatic transformation in the commercial vehicle space since Decisiv was founded,” says Hyatt. “The industry really hadn’t moved for 50 years. Then, all of a sudden, it was like a rocket lit and we’re now experiencing a revolution in mobility, driven by the emerging technologies we’re seeing in the coming Connected, Autonomous, Shared, Electric (CASE), and AI-supported world. On a broader level, customers have become accustomed to receiving information and communication almost immediately from businesses they patronize, due to increased levels of self-service and automation and a sharper focus on customer satisfaction initiatives from e-commerce giants such as Amazon. All of this is happening at really remarkable speeds right now. These evolutions will create lots of new opportunities in asset service and maintenance and will generate new requirements that can most effectively be met within the collaborative framework of an SRM Ecosystem.”
Driving the SRM Ecosystem and Decisiv Forward: A Focus on Asset Management
Decisiv’s next wave of growth is being driven by an expanded focus on asset management, going beyond delivering service management to manufacturers and dealers and working to reduce operating costs and streamline the entire maintenance process for fleets, maintenance providers, fleet maintenance companies, and leasing organizations. Decisiv is making great strides toward this goal through several new initiatives. One example is the recent integration of the Cummins Guidanz suite of web-based and mobile products into the SRM Ecosystem in support of the companies’ shared fleet and service provider customers. The new partnership will allow fleets, managed care providers, and service providers to have access to Cummins-supplier engine information available at the point of service. A second initiative, the recent introduction of Decisiv’s SRM ServicePlan, provides an innovative way to proactively manage maintenance and service with the goal of eliminating unplanned repairs. This enables asset owners to eliminate the uncertainty, wasted expense, and lost time in managing expensive commercial assets and is an important next step on the path to autonomous service management.
Increasing Access to the SRM Ecosystem Through the Decisiv Marketplace
Decisiv is also growing by providing existing and prospective customers with increased access to SRM Ecosystem asset and service data through the Decisiv Marketplace, which launched in February 2020 as a platform for SRM partners to showcase their services and solutions and bring new products to market. Along with details on integrated solutions and services offerings from dozens of partners, the Marketplace offers a wide range of industry insights and information and an expanded version of Decisiv’s Service Data Index, a regional breakdown and comparative analysis of North American parts and labor costs. The research and reports, derived from more than 3.5 million service events annually, marks the first-time transaction-level service data has ever been made available to the industry. The breadth and currency of the information is invaluable to fleets as they critically assess and compare service costs on both a national and regional basis.
If you are interested in better understanding the specific asset service management solutions that Decisiv and their partners are providing to Fleets, Service Providers, Dealers and Manufacturers, please contact Decisiv here: www.decisiv.com/get-in-touch
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