Our engagement with industrial and technical service providers is multifaceted and deep. We help them with sophisticated market segmentation and competitive analysis to identify growth opportunities and recognize threats and in developing winning strategies at corporate, business unit or regional level. We help design the right business models and offerings, optimize organizational structures and drive change.
On the operational side we work with our clients to improve performance, from deciding how to deploy footprint, capacity and resources to implementing responsive customer service. We help them develop, price, negotiate and win bids; Build superior execution capabilities to deliver large, complex projects on time and within budget, achieve objectives in major contracts or turnaround underperforming ones.We provide expertise and support for operational improvement along the EPC and O&M value chains and productivity improvement of distributed workforces based on lean principles. And we help our clients appraise opportunities through technology, conceptualize digitization initiatives and evaluate, select and implement the right technologies to support objectives, strategies and operational performance initiatives.
Changing market landscape, stronger competitors
Broad based or specialized, pure play service providers have emerged as key constituents in the industrial services market, which is showing signs of increasing concentration in all geographies. As a part of an effort to reduce unit costs through increased utilization, better spread overhead and improve ability to serve large customers across regions, major players have been expanding footprint, extending scope and growing in size. At the same time, changes in OEM strategies and upheavals in a number of end-user markets due to commodity demand and price declines, have fueled a wave of major spin-offs and acquisitions of former OEM service divisions that has visibly transformed the industry from primarily local to increasingly regional or even global. The challenge to large players now is to confront the strong competitive focus of OEMs on comprehensive services on the one hand, and consolidate and drive gains from their larger size on the other, while responding to reducing customer investment, performance challenges and strong price pressures in a number of sectors, including many of the process industries.
In outsourced support services, such as maintenance and asset management, the days of low hanging fruit, when contracts could be won simply through payroll reductions are long gone. Companies must now find new ways to continue delivering on cost reductions (scale) or customer performance improvements (knowhow and skills). Providers must also be prepared to shoulder more risk, as customers demand a stronger focus on outcomes. At the same time OEMs are forcefully pushing into the service market with the intent of capturing significant portions of available revenue pools. They rely on superior product knowledge and new, technology based, offerings, bundling services with core products with the aim of locking customers in and competitors out over the long run. Industrial Internet of Things technology coupled with powerful analytics, supports both better asset performance and reduced cost of delivery, including reduced manpower needs. To compete service providers must face a transition to less labor intensive business models.