Services

Integrating products and services to customized hybrid products can help firms to differentiate from their competitors. The essential value proposition of such bundled offerings can comprise usage-based selling (e.g. of machines) combined with guaranteed availability or the operation of customers’ complex production factors such as a complete assembly line. Operational efficiency is no longer sufficient for achieving long term success with hybrid products. Rather it is the way of interaction with customers which provides new opportunities for value creation. In the context of hybrid products the way of creating value for customers changes from a purely transactional view to a relational process. Accordingly, this paper addresses this change from a process-oriented perspective.

Competence in building more innovative ships will help the German Maritime Industry guaranteeing its existence under competitive conditions in respect to Asia. The realistic visualisation with Virtual Reality (VR) enables the demonstration of the shipyard’s design competence to the customer in an early stage as well as the discussion of design decisions and their implications between ship yard and supplier. Using the example of shipbuilding, the article shows which changes in the business processes of a company are essential for an efficient use of VR and which add-ons are necessary for a user-oriented ease of operation.

Traditionally product focused companies diversify into the industrial service business and recognize the transition to solution provider as a key idea for their business. But the historically grown organizational structures do only support this transition to a certain extent. Existing structures need to be replaced by organizational design which supports the new strategies of the companies. Product business and service business will need to be organizationally detached from each other. These changes in organizations are often accompanied by conflicts and challenges which need to be addressed.

The creation and configuration of innovative business models within the sheet metal forming industry focuses on the development of saleable product-service-combinations. It is necessary to integrate these product-service-combinations in adequate value chain configurations. To charge the output of the product-service-combinations appropriate revenue models must be selected and configured. This article shows an integrative methodology for redesigning existing and creating new business models.

The following short market survey presents interfaces between services in industry and logistic of five different providers. Main topics in the survey were the use of IT-Systems, connection with cooperation partners, challenges in the Supply Chain and trends concerning the future of industrial services.

Enterprises increasingly seek to differentiate from competitors by offering complete solutions in form of aligned goods and services. Effectively and efficiently offering such integrated solutions (also referred to as hybrid value bundles) requires an integration of production’s and service unit’s data and processes. Supporting the required data exchanges and providing novel functionality opens up new vistas for vendors of ERP systems.

Although German planning service providers have specialized know-how in the field of factory planning, their size and insufficient resources limit their options to provide their services internationally. The formation of networks represents an outstanding opportunity for SME to bundle their competencies to become active in international markets. In order to support this process, this article identifies opportunities for bundling systems from the perspective of providers and describes potential network configurations. In addition, it introduces measures and actions intended to support planning service providers when they implement their services internationally in a network.

Despite the increasing importance of industrial services, they are frequently developed unsystematically and often do not meet needs and expectations to guarantee a successful market launch. The increasing competition in many service markets emphasize the need for systematic analysis of all requirements, meaning to continuously develop innovative services that meet exactly with requirements of customers, employees, management and other stakeholders. This paper introduces a systematic process to analyse requirements within the process of new service development.

Firms offering product-related services can be distinguished by development stages or by types. Type-1 firms focus on the product and may benefit from refinements of service cost accounting. Type-2 firms exhibit an extended offer of separately priced services. For these firms, capacity planning and thus information on fixed capacity costs is especially important. Type-3 firms offer relationship-based services and thereby increasingly apply full-service contracts. This alters the risk distribution between the firm and its customers so that variable costs and pricing issues become more important.

industrial enterprises to permanently develop new strategies to differentiate themselves from their competitors. Besides product innovations, services complementing these products are increasingly used for differentiation purposes. But only the right combination of different services forming a service portfolio allows successful service offering. Therefore, a systematic engineering approach is required to compose a service portfolio that fits to a company’s potentials as well as to customer requirements. However, until today this aspect of service engineering is not continuously and systematically supported.