Customer Service 21st Century-style

[From iSource Business, August/September 2002] During the Great Depression of the 1930's, Frank W. "Pat" Murphy resided in Illinois in a little town called Mt. Carmel along the banks of the Wabash River. He was making his living as a sales manager for an equipment distributor, and many of his customers came to him with one main complaint about their equipment: burned up engines. So Murphy put himself fully behind the task of solving what was troubling his clients. He found that the engine operators were bringing in engines equipped with poor quality, non-indicating safety switches that were difficult to test or were inoperative. So, in order to make life a little easier for them, he put his knowledge of engines to work and came up with the idea of a
"safety switch."

This safety switch combined an indicating gauge with a switch that stopped an engine when it had low oil pressure or high coolant temperatures. After field testing his new invention on several unattended oil field engines, Murphy introduced it to his clients.

The operators quickly caught on to the technology, since it featured an operating gauge they could actually see, as well as the ability to adjust the trip point to their needs and to test the switch for operation. Because his safety switch was so well accepted, Murphy quit his job with the equipment distributor and devoted his full attention to producing the instruments in the kitchen of his home - and the company FWMurphy was born.

Today, FWMurphy is a $50 million enterprise that employs over 400 employees with headquarters in Tulsa, Okla., and manufacturing sites elsewhere in the United States, Mexico and the United Kingdom. It makes products for the industrial engine market, with customers such as Ford, John Deere and Caterpillar; and the gas compressor industry, with customers like Hanover and Universal Compressor.

Despite its success, the company is still based on the same principles that birthed it 63 years ago: "We are driven by customer satisfaction and service. Our responsibility is to understand our external and internal customers' needs, provide timely solutions and fulfill commitments," according to the company's core values. That's why, when faced with the opportunity to improve relationships with its customer base, FWMurphy embraced the idea of customer relationship management (CRM) and its technology without hesitation.

Driven to Serve

FWMurphy's management had realized for some time that the way in which the company handled its customer information was quickly becoming outdated. Mitch Myers, FWMurphy's vice president of operations, says, "One of the things FWMurphy has prided itself on in the past has been customer intimacy - it's been one of our core competencies." And customer intimacy is extremely difficult to maintain in a growing organization when, as Myers explains, all the information about the company's customers resides either in the heads of its sales force or written on pieces of paper sitting on employees' desks.

Another reason driving FWMurphy's commitment to ramping up its processes: It has set a goal of being recognized as a world class manufacturing company, guided by the American Production Inventory Control Society's (APICS) education and concepts. According to Myers, the company achieved Class A status for a user of material requirements planning (MRP) last December and has since maintained that designation. But the APICS designation "takes it to the next level," Myers explains. "It talks about using lean concepts within your enterprise. It talks of partnering with your suppliers, focusing on customer service and customer service excellence. It talks about Six Sigma quality and all of the really lofty goals a manufacturing company would pursue - and we're in pursuit of that."