There’s a critical difference between an experienced technician and a new employee sent to fix a problem. Aquant seeks to centralize knowledge and also enable inexperienced technicians to obtain information, quicky and efficiently, based on the know-how of experienced and skilled technicians, about everything from washing machines to medical equipment.
"We make it possible to hire employees who are less skilled and therefore cheaper, and make them just as efficient as a veteran, experienced employee," says Shahar Chen. Along with Assaf Melochna, he founded Aquant after more than a decade of working together and getting to know the service market. The two had worked together at resource management software developer ClickSoftware, before its acquisition by Salesforce. "The problem found us more than we found it," says Melochna. "ClickSoftware solved the problem of assigning tasks to field service workers. We realized that some of those assignments shouldn’t have been there in the first place - we found that 25% were return visits. " Chen adds that "Aquant's product complements what we did at ClickSoftware, and today we have a partnership with Salesforce."
A catalog of all malfunctions
Their assumption was that if an employee has experience, their knowledge is also probably documented somewhere. When they looked into it, they found that, in most cases, the information existed, but not in an orderly fashion. Chen: "We are establishing a 'knowledge super set'. That’s how we discovered found that 80% of the information was saved as free text. Aquant knows how to utilize that as well. We take all the problems that have ever been reported by customers and build a catalog. The other part of the equation are the field technicians. After fixing the issue, they explain what they’ve done. We analyze that part, too."
The information serves help desks as well, which can sometimes provide solutions remotely. "We try to replicate information to the point where everyone in the organization can ‘Give 20 Years of Experience in 20 Seconds.’"
"We sell to every company that provides machine repair services, from washing machines to airplanes, to early cancer detection. They all run on the same data systems. The analysis is done intelligently with tools we have developed. We ask customers to ‘dump’ their information with us, as is. These days, we can have major customers online in 11 weeks and smaller customers in five to six weeks."
Clients also include manufacturers like Siemens, and companies like Home Depot that rent out tools and also employ service technicians. "Most of our customers are in the United States," says Melochna. "We founded the company when we lived there. Today about 85% of our customers are in North America. We have several Israeli customers, including Orbotech, and in the last year and a half, European customers have come in. Today, we employ 90 workers, half in the US and half in Israel."
The company is proud of customers from the medical sector, such as Becton Dickinson, which joined in 2020. "Five of the ten largest medical companies use our system," they say.
Aquant
- Business: Preserving knowledge from across the organization for service technicians.
- History: Founded in 2016 by Assaf Melochna (President) and Shahar Chen (CEO)
- Stats: 94 employees. $110 million raised.
Published by Globes, Israel business news - en.globes.co.il - on December 7, 2021.
© Copyright of Globes Publisher Itonut (1983) Ltd., 2021.