Some thoughts out of what I had experienced at work as a service specialist at Carl Zeiss ShangHai during my stay from March, 2008-Feb, 2009
1, it was a very good idea that to establish a Carl Zeiss organization in china, china is a very big market with up to 300 columns of EM sold annually, china market deserves to be a stand alone branch at least or even leads other branches close by, but not just to be a profit center or a sub branch under Singapore Carl Zeiss.
2, Zeiss Singapore (SEA) let all his Chinese employees sign contracts with Carl Zeiss ShangHai, but leave all management/orders coming from Singapore. Zeiss Shanghai only takes care of the offices space of all NTS staff in ShangHai, Beijing and Guangzhou, the labour related legal issues around like employment contracts and their financial services majorly issuing salaries.
This type of setup is no doubt very convenient and quick for Zeiss to gain his infrastructure, but in fact had caused huge confusion amongst all employees and even low confidence and suspicion amongst the customers.
Remote control from Singapore to China like this has very low efficiency, spare parts order turn around time at 1month al so, only 2-3 percent systems are on the service contracts, a quotation turn around time internally is at 1 month al so, plus the turn around time externally at the customer side; totally it would take 3 months to get a single job done.
Staff training is slow, harsh and not functional, service engineers suffer to pick up knowledge on time, they go on their own soon after the Singapore factory training and had to learn everything by their mistake on site.
Many customers had refused to accept new engineer come on site to touch their instrument, a few of them specially required engineers to provide their qualification and service period certificates before they allow an engineer to come on site and touch the machine.
Spare parts prices are copied directly from Singapore list, therefore the prices are not suiting China market at all. Almost every customer complained the high cost of Zeiss spares, some customer called Singapore salesman greedy and bad after they paid for the high cost.
Knowledge transferring to the end-users is not in place at all, only lucky customers may have got the factory training, most of them obtain very limited operational and maintenance knowledge from the installation engineer, but not sufficient at all; damages were incurred by the users when operation blindly due to this bad knowledge transferring.
Remote control from Singapore to China may work if all infrastructures are in place and functional, but that is not the case, not even close! Remote control to China from Singapore had caused chaos because nothing is set up.
Management comes from Singapore shows up rarely and rapidly in ShangHai office, their offices are empty most of the time. Senior managers, directors and country managers who wear top suites stay in 5 stars hotel only, comparing to the service and sales engineers having RMB100 daily allowance and lodging under RMB300 places, they belong to a different world, and they speak also like from a different world.
There was absolutely no meeting or gathering up held between service staff and service manager, the service manager showed up in the shanghai office majorly for the meeting with sales and directors.
Pro-active way of service is not achievable, as a service engineer must report everything back to the service manager and get approval before he can act or even just make a statement in front of the customer, usually the response from the service manager is slow and never in time.
Service engineer got warning from his manger for mentioning something like internal information to the customer.
Huge communication problems internally, service engineers felt stranded when customer phoned in, because they have no authority to make any action or statement, eventually they just forward everything to the manager and wait for command for further actions. Engineers’ suggestion upwards to the managers got no response or diplomatic ones.
Management have no intention to listen to their employees, they operate in their own vacuum, gazing at sales numbers only. When complains received from the customers, the free of charge (FOC) parts and labour are the answers to just cease the fire.
Customer got used to this, they communicated each other and they all complained for something just to get the service done for free, service engineer who try to charge the customer got warning from top.
When complain of a service engineer reached the management, despite what the reasons are, another “good” engineer was then dispatched to replace the “bad” one and get the job done, “bad” and “good” engineers have no overlapping on site, “bad” ones hardly get chance to be sent back to the same customer again.
3, Zeiss NTS announced in the market that Zeiss is on its own doing the market now since 2008, but at the mean time appointed large amount of agencies in various areas in China to represent Zeiss again to sell in China. This had caused even bigger confusion and suspicion in the market, users are saying they don’t trust this so-called Zeiss at all; they’d rather not put any faith on Zeiss until they see physical evidence that Zeiss is different than before!