Management Insights

 ‘Profitable long term growth comes from having the right people in the right place at the right time.’ Technology although important, usually plays a secondary role. In todays fast moving world this might be an “off-message” statement, but the truth is that it is still people who deliver profits.  As […]

A successful solutions business is hard to implement. Whether or not it is the right competitive approach depends on a company’s strength in the market, how well it knows its customers (domain knowledge) and to what extent it is willing to invest in the necessary capabilities (possibly meaning a permanent […]

Within the general servitization buzz the talk is a lot about transitions to outcome or performance based services, where a supplier contracts with a customer for outcomes -not activities- and gets paid accordingly. OEMs often bundle products and services into solutions (product-service systems) to produce the outcome, Rolls Royce’s “power-by-the-hour” […]

Is ‘Servitization’ a paradigm shift in manufacturing or simply a manufacturing Business Model to deliver services specifically supporting the customer’s use of the manufactured product?

Based on the reasoning described in Part 1 of this article, we can conclude that for collaboration to make business and economic sense, in particular for smaller and medium sized companies such as most of those operating independently in technical / industrial (after sales) service markets, it must help make […]

Part 1 Collaboration and new ecosystems made possible by technology are in vogue today, but they usually involve either some form of tighter integration along a value chain (supplier to customer), better project oriented cooperation within companies or the coalescing of industry participants around a central platform provider to access […]

The Historical context 50 years ago most companies that made stuff had a product focus sometimes known by academics as Goods Dominant logic, in which tangible products were sold. Now more and more business are moving to delivering outcomes under a Service Dominant logic approach. The change is profound! This […]

The mistake many leaders in industry make, is to believe that defining a clear vision and strategy with ruthless follow up is the only recipe for success. This may indeed initiate change, but rarely do the results last. Often 3-4 years later, the business will be addressing the very same […]

Companies frequently review their approach and discuss how to become more explicit and attentive to their customers’ needs. Almost always this leads to a discussion about services. Service organisations represent the customer and the customer operations better than most other parts of the company due to their closeness and local […]

Managers in all businesses are driven to measure key elements of their performance, because we all know that old maxim: ‘If you can not measure it, you can’t manage it’. In blogs and white papers you will find a raft of must have KPI’s that will give you the control […]