service management

In increasingly competitive markets professional service firms are highly recommended to continuously scrutinize and improve the efficiency of their job execution. Providing content-related high quality services, such as technical or business consulting, the respective sub-processes as well as each single activity have to be coordinated effectively and required information needs to be provided completely and in time. Thereby, requirements of an operation at different sites have to be considered, both at the customer’s and the company’s own premises, concerning various areas and locations. This article is an abstract of the problem, the solution and the project-related findings based on a practical example.

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.

In recent years machine and plant manufacturers transformed to providers of complex after-sales services. After that transformation, many companies have problems in managing their activities effectively and efficiently. There is a lack of transparency on the not longer material driven processes. Bosch Packaging Services AG, as a provider of extensive after-sales services for the packaging machines sold by Bosch, realized the needed transparency through the development of two software tools on the basis of the InCoCo-S Reference Model, a process reference model for industrial services. Now Bosch Packaging Services is in the position to offer sustainable service contracts with adequate prices and realistic performance levels.

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.

Today the service, which a producing company is offering his customers, has a more distinguishing potential than the product itself. In this case the quality and economy of the service is the deciding factor. This is even more valid when the service is not carried out by the producing company itself, but by a service contractor, which integrates itself into the value adding chain between the producer and the customer. The developments in the communications technology and in particular the Internet show possibilities for advanced services, which go clearly beyond the classical remote maintenance concepts of the past years.

This article aims at pointing out both theoretical starting points and a conceptual framework for the management of services. The theoretical considerations take up the concept of the bundles of values and the interpretation of services as solutions to customers’ problems. On the conceptual level, a structuring of the complex ma- nagement problem is proposed. This makes it possible to identify relevant action fields and to subject to a differentiated analysis.

Innovative services increasingly represent a critical factor for industrial enterprises to differ from competitors. While the industrial engineering was optimized over decades, services generally are designed unsystematically. This results inefficient planning and failures in meeting the needs of the customer. The article gives an overview on basic forms of existing service engineering procedure models and describes a generic, ICT-supported framework for the service-specific design of development processes.

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.