Volvo Penta: White Glove Service

White Glove Service

by Paola Bertelli - ph. Courtesy by Volvo Penta

Volvo Penta is focusing increasingly the superyacht world with an international service organization that provides rapid intervention to cut downtime for owners and their boats to a minimum

After sales service and support have always been the jewel in Volvo Penta’s crown. And this year, both have made a further leap in quality as headquarters made the decision to create a dedicated new Marine Service Market division dedicated solely to the nautical sector, spanning all of Volvo Penta’s market units and consequently available all over the world. “Service is changing, applications are increasingly complex, and our clients are becoming more demanding and professional, so we needed to an even more structured and coherent evolution of our network,” explains engineer Raul Lovati, who heads the Marine Service Market at Volvo Penta Italia, which has over 170 service points covering not just the whole of Italy but also Malta, Slovenia and Croatia. For the last several years, Volvo Penta has been installing triple and quadruple IPS 30 set-ups, throwing opening the door to the megayacht sector on which it is now focusing with extreme precision and commitment. The natural next step was an ad hoc service managed by headquarters in close collaboration with the service network. In the yacht world, service and support are a very demanding area.

There are 3,500 Volvo Penta dealers worldwide spread across 130 different nations. The Italy Market Unity (see infographic below) has over 170 specialist service points in Italy, Malta, Slovenia and Croatia

Luciano Porcu, head of global OEM Service, is the man that brings it all together, managing client cases and the big shipyards on an international level. “The key to success of any intervention is speed and professionalism. My role is to help cut times, improve internal and external communication, and provide feedback to the main players involved: shipyard, client, dealers, specialists back at headquarters”. To constantly improve its service, this summer, Volvo Penta also launched a series of target pilot programmes. Porcu picks up the story: “How fast you intervene is all down to having the right people in the right place. We identified the Costa Smeralda and Majorca as two strategic areas of in the Mediterranean and so we sent engineers from headquarters and the Market Units out there for the season to support our existing extensive service network. Another major move to underscore our presence on the ground to our clients”. Volvo Penta also shored up its stock of certain pivotal spare parts so that they were available at virtually zero miles in Mediterranean. “Our clients want to get going again as soon as possible. And we are working in that direction”. volvopenta.com