Service Leaders NetworkTM

Collaborate to Compete

An intimate Peer-2-Peer Community

Next SLN Summit
March 2025

Frankfurt, Germany
Read more about it here

For Senior Service Leaders and Managers

  • Grow Service revenue, earnings, and customer loyalty
  • Drive Service excellence and performance
  • Reduce cost through process improvements and digitization
  • Discover new profitable Service offerings and innovations
  • Develop your people

Collaboration for Value

The Service Leaders Network builds on the exchange of experience and insights as well as collaboration between members in common projects to build stronger capabilities and knowledge among participants, drive performance, master challenges and solve problems.

At its heart are “Experience Exchange” workshops -key for members to make the most out of each others’ expertise, experience, and insights. “Collaborative Projects” -projects undertaken by members working together to solve a common problem or enhance performance- are the next step and involve co-development or application of tools and methods and sharing of results.

Companies collaborating on such projects are non-competing and sign confidentiality agreements. Not only do exchange and collaboration enhance individual performance. But with the right facilitation and guidance the business outcomes usually far exceed what would have been accomplished by members working on their own -while the costs are far lower -thus ensuring returns that are a multiple of the required investment.

And the Service Leaders Network offers further benefits: It provides access to benchmarking exercises, and it unlocks a growing knowledge base of research and best-practice methodologies. It provides opportunities for networking and organizes events with global thought leaders on key service management topics, business and technology trends.

Members also gain fast and easy access to experts and specialists. Whether for problem-solving, fast insights, validation of ideas, business coaching, or training: As and when it is required.

Service Leaders Network

A Peer-2-Peer Collaborative Approach

Experience Exchange

Exchange experience, expertise, and insights with colleagues from different companies and industries to build know-how and capabilities.

Collaborative Projects

Collaborate with colleagues from different companies to address a challenge or solve a problem that you select as high priority.

Benchmarking +

Benchmark with peers and industry leaders. Discover a growing methodological library, management tools, and best practice guides.

On-Demand Advisory

Augment your capability and capacity through rapid expert or peer support when you need it and as much as you need -On any challenging topic.

Bespoke Research

Keep your finger on the pulse of your industry. Commission research individually or with peers. Reduce the cost, increase the relevance.

Methods and Tools

Optimize your service business operations and projects with our tailored library of management tools, guidelines, blueprints, and more.

Experience Exchange

SLN’s Experience Exchanges are the core service offering. Members meet in workshops to discuss significant business challenges facilitated by experts. All members can participate in 4 of these sessions each year. The sessions include presentations, debates, and workshops to define solutions or best practices. Deep Dive Sessions are also available for those with particular interests or pressing problems. These Exchanges help members address their own and their businesses’ performance and get returns on their SLN investment.

Collaborative Projects

Collaborative Projects involve Si2 facilitating non-competing companies’ co-development and implementation of solutions to common challenges. Members meet regularly, share results, and sign confidentiality agreements. Previous projects include optimizing remote services, improving sales force performance, and enabling technology implementation. Collaborative Projects provide excellent business outcomes at a fraction of the cost and effort of traditional consulting projects.

Benchmarking

Service is becoming a competitive focus and benchmarking is important. Si2 has a Service Excellence Framework for SLN members to use for internal projects or to participate in benchmarking organized by Si2 with other companies. Differences are identified to close gaps, and improvement actions are defined, quantified, costed, and prioritized. This is repeated at regular intervals with analysis and workshops to update or upgrade the framework as required.

On-Demand Support and Advisory

On-Demand Advisory is a rapid support and advisory service for members of the Service Leaders Network. Based on SLN’s evolving platform it brings together those with a problem, question or challenge with those who can help answer or solve it, both Si2 experts and other members. On-Demand may also be used to help generate new ideas, validate thinking or simply resolve own capacity constraints -as an extended workbench. Virtually, rapidly and cost-effectively, wherever you are in the world, On-Demand Advisory helps ensure that you are never alone with a difficult challenge.

Bespoke Research

SLN Members can keep their finger on the pulse of their industry, market or customer base -whether individually or together with others- by commissioning bespoke research reports on important topics of interest, including market, customer and competitive surveys as well as industry-specific service and technology reports. In addition SLN provides free access to regular briefings, white papers and thinksheets to help guide decision making, strategy and operational readiness.

Methods and Tools

SLN Members can improve their business, operations, and project implementation through access to a growing methodological library, the outcome of many years of experience and research, including management tools, methods and guidelines specifically adapted to and tailored for service business. They include strategy, operational and sales frameworks, how-to guides, blueprints and more.

Service in Industry

Deep dive into the industrial service business.

Join our community to receive analysis, insight, news and more.
We will never share your data

Service in Industry

Deep dive into the industrial service business.

Join our community to receive analysis, insight, news and more.
We will never share your data

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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