technical services

The market for technical services is currently undergoing a transformation that is having an impact on the business models and structures of companies in this market. This change also has consequences for the specialists at technical service providers: In addition to new technical knowledge, they have to communicate more with customers and partners in particular. These interactions are not always free of conflict and can become stressful for employees. The article shows examples of how technical service companies can improve the interaction situation of their employees with organizational measures.

Latest developments within the production engineering area carry out a more higher complexity of products combined with an increasing need of customer integrated services. Due to the hereby resulting high investments of time and money it is necessary to develop a methodological approach of the service engineering process as well as the collaboration within the partnering networks. Single enterprises use already different types of Internet enabled collaborative technologies but an enterprise widespreading collaborative development and use of services is not occuring in a sufficient way so far. The paper de-scribes a problem-adequate design of a collaborative technical service within a production network between customers, manufacturers and suppliers. The paper’s result is to demonstrate collaboration service facilities in order to increase the effectivity and efficiency of service processes.

The level of vertical integration or disintegration of technical services strongly depends on the design of interfaces between the parties involved. Therefore, the organizational structure has to be closely coordinated with the functional service structure. In this article a methodology is described for bundling single services into a modular structure to avoid efficiency losses at the interfaces.