How mature is your service offering, actually?
Anders Jungar, Manager at PBI
Dr. Magnus Hellström, Senior Lecturer at Åbo Akademi University
Many companies struggle with industrial services, especially when it comes to harvesting their full financial potential. Typical problems with industrial service offerings are lack of clarity as to what has been promised, cost-overruns, delayed deliveries as well as quality issues when delivering these services to the customers.
In addition, your customers may constantly request you to adapt your offering to the customer’s own systems and preferences, and your organization sticks to old specifications or habits of delivering the services. According to our experience, there is a direct connection between low service offering maturity and the aforementioned issues.
In our previous blog post, we talked about the importance of developing a comprehensive service portfolio based on real customer needs. Most probably your company has already developed or is a good way on the road of developing an extensive offering. But do you know how mature your offering is?
What do we mean by mature then? A mature service is one that is sold in a similar fashion to different customers, is understood similarly across the organization, can be handed-over from sales to delivery in a harmonious way, and perhaps most of all, can be reliably and profitably delivered.
PBI has developed a method for assessing the maturity of a company’s service offering. The method provides a clear roadmap towards servitization excellence and has been validated through a number of client assignments. It has shown to be effective in identifying where the main gaps are and what should be done to rectify the problems.
We have identified eight different ‘building blocks’ that need to be analysed when assessing the service maturity (see picture above). The assessment provides a comprehensive view, ranging from more strategic topics to value propositions, costing and pricing as well as IPR related matters. Based on the assessment, a fact-based roadmap for increasing the maturity of the service offering can be built, taking into account all these eight ‘building blocks’.
In our following blogs, we will present this method step-by-step. Stay tuned.
Anders Jungar is a Manager at PBI within the strategic consulting workforce. His topics of special interest are industry logic and business models, productization of industrial services and solutions business.
Dr. Magnus Hellström is a Senior Lecturer at Åbo Akademi University. His research interest centers around service- and collaboration-driven value creation in the project business.