product-related services

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.

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.