Driving World Class Industrial Service

We help industrial companies create world-class service businessess to beat the competition. We work across many sectors to craft new strategies and innovative business models, optimize operations, drive preformance and technology adoption, and help execute organizational transformation. Our workshops and training programs empower service leaders, managers, sales and technical personnel from all over the world.

About Us

Who we are

Our partners and associates combine many years of managerial, consulting and technical experience, most are recognized leaders in their fields. We speak the language of our clients and have shared the challenges and opportunities they face. 
We work globally across various industries and offer consulting solutions, market and business research, training, and business execution support. We also operate the Service Leaders Network, a subscription-based service providing experience and knowledge sharing as well as collaborative problem-solving to senior managers and practitioners in our field. We work closely with our clients to make services a cornerstone of their success.

Our Business

Services, in particular after sales services, provide a strategic anchor for many companies in diverse industries, aiming at a mix of maximizing customer loyalty and retention, generating additional revenues and profits from the installed base and defending against lower cost competitors. 
Now, however, technology is driving powerful shifts, fragmenting demand, transforming how companies operate and interact with customers, while enabling entirely new business models and product/service offerings. Products, in fact, increasingly defined by the outcomes they achieve and the data they generate, are increasingly becoming services.

Our Capabilities

We help our clients leverage services to gain competitive advantage, achieve critical business objectives and improve their business. We do this  through our skills and expertise and strive to make a tangible contribution to their success.

We bring together capabilities covering most aspects of service businesses in industrial environments, from strategy and business model engineering, to technology and operations. We are experts in after-sales services, industrial asset management as practiced by vendors and we can help you drive outcome based initiatives and long term contracts.

Strategy and Organizational Change

We develop and implement service-based strategies for growth and competitive advantage - and sustain them in the future

Sales and Marketing Management

As B2B sales shift to digital platforms and companies expand their service portfolios, we help our clients adjust and optimize their practices

Innovation and
Digital Services

We help clients align tech with business goals and manage implementation - enhancing operations and market success

Operations Performance Management

We use state-of-the-art methodology to streamline the service value chain and improve quality, cycle times and customer satisfaction

Aftersales and Lifecycle Services

We help create worldclass aftersales service organizations to strengthen relations with customers and drive growth from the installed base

Implementation and Business Execution

We help execute on strategic and organizational initiatives. And we spearhead business development and performance programs

Programs and Workshops

News and Insights

Si2 News

Service Leaders Network

Insights

Vendor Service Strategies: HVAC Business

The HVAC market is changing. To succeed in service OEMs must up their game, expand their offerings and upgrade their sales and operational capabilities. And the competition is not standing still.

Read More »

Service in Industry

Deep dive into the industrial service business.

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Service Innovation for value-driven opportunities:

Facilitated by Professor Mairi McIntyre from the University of Warwick, the workshop explored service innovation processes that help us understand what makes our customers successful.

In particular, the Customer Value Iceberg principle goes beyond the typical Total Cost of Ownership view of the equipment world and explores how that equipment impacts the success of the business. It forces us to consider not only direct costs associated with usage of the equipment such but also indirect costs such as working capital and risks.

As an example, we looked at how MAN Truck UK used this method to develop services that went beyond the prevailing repairs, parts and maintenance to methods (through telematics and clever analytics) to monitor and improve the performance and  fuel consumption of their trucks. This approach helped grow their business by an order of magnitude over a number of years.

Mining Service Management Data to improve performance

We then took a deep dive into how Endress + Hauser have developed applications that can mine Service Management data to improve service performance:  

Thomas Fricke (Service Manager) and Enrico De Stasio (Head of Corporate Quality & Lean) facilitated a 3 hour discussion on their journey from idea to a real working application integrated into their Service processes. These were the key learning points that emerged:

Leadership

In 2018 the Senior leadership concluded that to stay competitive they needed to do far more to consolidate their global service data into a “data lake’ that could be used to improve their own service processes and bring more value to customers. As a company they had already seen the value of organising data as over the past 20 years for every new system they already had a “digital twin” which held electronically all the data for that system in an organised fashion. Initially, it was basic Bill of Material data, but has since grown in sophistication. So a good start but they needed to go further, and the leadership team committed resources to do this.

  • The first try: The project initially focused on collecting and organising data from its global service operations into a data lake.  This first phase required the development of infrastructure, processes and applications that could analyse service report data and turn it into actionable intelligence. The initial goal was to make internal processes more efficient, and so improve the customer experience. E+H looked for patterns in the reports of service engineers that could:
    • Be used to improve the performance of Service through processes and individuals
    • Be used by other groups such as engineering to improve and enhance product quality.
  • Outcome: Eventhough progress was made in many areas, nevertheless, even using advanced statistical methods, they could not extract or deliver the value they had hoped   for from the data. They needed to look at something different.
  • Leveraging AI technologies: The Endress+Hauser team knew they needed to look for patterns in large data sets. They had the knowledge that self-learning technologies that are frequently termed as AI, could potentially help solve this problem. They teamed up with a local university and created a project to develop a ‘Proof of Concept’. This helped the project gain traction as the potential of the application they had created started to emerge. It was not an easy journey and required “courage to trust the outcomes, see them fail and then learn from the process”. However after about 18 months they were able to integrate the application into their normal working processes where every day they scan the service reports from around the world in different languages to identify common patterns in product problems, or anomalies in the local service team activities. This information is fed back to the appropriate service teams for action. The application also acts as a central hub where anyone in the organisation can access and interrogate service report data to improve performance and develop new value propositions.
  • Improvement:  The project does not stop there. It is now embedded in the service operations and used as a basic tool for continuous improvement. In effect, this has shifted the whole organization to be more aware of the value of their data.

Utilizing AI in B2B services

Regarding AI, our task was to uncover some of the myths and benefits for service businesses and the first task was to agree on what we really mean by AI among the participants. It took time, but we discovered that there are really two interpretations which makes the term rather confusing. The first is a generic term used by visionaries and AI professionals to describe a world of intelligent machines and applications. Important at a social & macroeconomic level, but perhaps not so useful for business operations -at least at a practical level. The second is an umbrella term for a group of technologies that are good at finding patterns in large data sets (machine learning, neural networks, big data, computer vision), that can interface with human beings (Natural Language Processing) and that mimic human intelligence through being based on self-learning algorithms. Understanding this second definition and how these technologies can be used to overcome real business challenges is where the immediate value of AI sits for today’s businesses. It was also clear that the implication of integrating these technologies into business processes will require leaders to look at the change management challenges for their teams and customers.

To understand options for moving ahead at a practical level we first looked briefly at Husky through an interview with CIO Jean-Christophe Wiltz to CIOnet where we learned that i) real business needs should tailored drive technology implementation, and ii) that before getting to AI technologies, there is a need to build the appropriate infrastructure in terms of database and data collection, and, most importantly, the need to be prepared to continually adapt this infrastructure as the business needs change.

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