Services

Confronted with intensive product price competition in China, industrial firms are forced to invest in extending the service business. Extending the service business is far from easy. Chinese competitors offer faked spare parts. Local service skills are very poor and service requirements force industrial firms to invest in logistic infrastructure. This article offers a guideline for managers seeking to professionalize the human resource management in the service organization, to adapt service offerings to the local customer needs, and to set-up a logistic infrastructure.

Today, mechanical and plant engineering companies are already providing service bundles in the form of product-service combinations. These consist of common ranges of services, e.g. for development, customisation, operator, financing or maintenance. As a rule however, the elements of service bundles are developed separately. Moreover, the services offered are often viewed as a necessity demanded by the market. A strategy appearing to promise long-term success is pursued by offering solutions in the form of hybrid products in which service and material good form a symbiotic relationship. Rigorously pursuing this strategy entails sustainably implementing a business process to develop hybrid products in a company. This paper discusses requirements of organizing this business process. Attention is focused on a networked approach to developing material goods and services as well as the incorporation of a mechanical and plant engineering company’s network of relationships.

In today’s competitive environment, product enhancing technical services (service products) are increasingly perceived as success factors in the production industry. Consequentially, there is a need for practically oriented models for systematic service product design. This paper defines service products and describes their functions and corresponding design dimensions. Furthermore, a recently developed phase model for systematic service product design is introduced, based on which an approach for the design of technical product service systems is presented. The approach aims at exploiting the largely unused potentials of the distribution and service network partners with which many production companies work together.

The stagnation of capital spending in the capital goods market leads to longer product lifecycles. For this reason the demand for support services and spare parts is continuously increasing as those are needed for maintenance and repairs. For suppliers of capital goods this means opportunity and challenge at the same time: While highly profitable after-sales services can compensate declining new product sales the after-sales business requires efficient service organisations which make support services and spare parts available, according to service level agreements.

Many manufacturing companies want to become solution providers. Unfortunately, they have not extended their service offering systematically. They also have not built up the required capabilities in the company. The article describes how companies can find the right breadth of service offering and the required competences by analysing the customers' processes and needs. The article serves as a guideline for managers to extend and implement the service offering.

In many cases producers of investment goods offer their customers product-related services to enhance the problem solving possibilities of the product. As these service offers are gaining importance for industry, an ever-increasing necessity to optimise service processes, as has been done for production processes in the past, emerges. Experiences so far clearly show that many industrial companies have not yet realised this necessity. Service processes are often provided in a rather unorganised way. Against this background this paper presents a tool to assist industrial efforts to analyse and optimise service processes.

This article reports how product manufacturers can benefit from an extended service business. After a short introduction, we explain the transition line from product manufacturers into service providers and describe the challenges inherent in the transition process. Then, we focus on identifying the success factors that need to be considered when creating a professional service management in the context of a manufacturing firm, and triggers to navigate the transition.

Business relation between customer and supplier is less characterized by purchase of investment goods. In terms of specific use tasks the functional utility of investment goods becomes of higher weight shortly. Within the new business relationship supplier becomes full-service-supplier and cus-tomer becomes user, as flexibility and availability are increasing. The definition contracting model used in plant engineering and construction describes the change from purchasing and property to acquisition by use. Due to the fact that it is a complex term, realizable types and physical forms of contracting models are presented below. Based on this, first experiences with contracting models are presented, future significance of contracting models is calculated, possible short-ages are identified as well as the need to act which hinder an implementation of contracting models yet.

The majority of manufacturing enterprises is currently trying to become more competitive in the preparation of customer-centric and innovative products. The focus of manufacturing paradigm is changing from a mainly sales-driven business towards a provider of utility or benefit to the customer. Consequently, the traditional product definition must be extended. Based on the description of the concept of extended products, this paper discusses approaches to extend the classical product definition and the resulting requirements. Additionally, the role of collaboration in enterprise networks will be discussed. Some practical examples are mentioned.

In recent years, services increasingly became a subject in research as well as in practice. In comparison with product development new service development often is dominated by intuitive action. Therefore there is a huge potential for optimizing the development procedure in terms of a determination, quality and customer focus. This article introduces an approach for service development that is based on a methodical approach. It is shown, how the complex task of service development can be simplified.