Autor: Patrice Lienhard

Service companies and service offering industrial enterprises face new challenges. These include the increasing substitution of similar goods and services from one enterprise with those of another, dynamic resources and the emancipation of the customer caused by the change from a seller’s to a buyer’s market. Knowledge about their own abilities, the customer’s needs, as well as their integration into a service strategy become critical success factors of an enterprise.

Knowledge as strategic resource becomes even more important now than in the past, because of the turbulent change experienced by a company and its operating environment. Therefore, innovative service companies attempt to bundle the existing knowledge in the company and to use it optimal. Through the accumulation of know-ledge, competencies arise which the competitor has difficulties imitating and which create a competitive advantage. The learning history method can now help to recover implicit knowledge in the company, to improve processes and to strengthen the service competence.