Service Leadership Roundtable

In these current times, service is one of the ways (sometimes the only one) to grow. CEO’s are now pressing their Service executives to find new services to speed service growth.

 It is seen as one of the major challenges to move more intelligence and knowledge from the field to support centres or remote centres, becoming stronger and stornger in remote monitoring, predictive maintenance, remote maintenance, remote diagnosis, improved work preparation dispatching, remote resolution of issues and also remote application support.

Besides benefits in productivity and efficiency, it is a means of developing new (value added) services, hence helping service proiders to face commoditisation of products and basid product related services.

Traditionally the discussion on sustainability was focussed on ‘greening’ the environment around the products a company manufactures. However, there now appears to be a shift towards an organisation's service operation as this may have an even bigger impact on the sustainability efforts.

Building a Smarter Supply Chain for the Future

There is a clear need to drive innovation into best-class organisations proving to top tier management and directors, that there is a need to change intrinsically throughout every aspect of the organisation. Indeed the future Supply Chain will be Smarter, will positively impact cost reduction, add value and improve bottom line results.

In order to recognise the power of the supply chain, our research will demonstrate;
- The importance of collaboration and risk reduction
- Why investment in technology will enable visibility across the supply chain
- The need to link KPI’s to increasing customer demands
The research will help further define the challenges in moving towards globalisation in your supply chain.

Companies starting a Service Transformation often encounter Process and IT issues such as how to balance standardisation without being monolithic, how to effectively redesign processes and implement them in systems, and how to avoid a disruptive big- bang approach, as well as many other challenges.

Too often we see organisations giving too much emphasis on:

• Incremental improvements of issues raised from delivery execution
• Benchmarking of operational KPI’s
• Copying best practices from (industry) peers which are not on best practice level
• Fixing issues or cutting cost without improving capabilities and processes

Where do you start? - How do you define the correct priorities for operational excellence?
Build a strategic business case that will win you executive commitment?
Deliver short term and midterm impact?
Ensure that measures result in sustainable improvements?

The upcoming Operational Excellence virtual roundtable is a forum where successful companies will exchange experiences and share best practices around these and other popular challenges.

Companies starting a Service Transformation often encounter Process and IT issues such as how to balance standardisation without being monolithic, how to effectively redesign processes and implement them in systems, and how to avoid a disruptive big- bang approach, as well as many other challenges.

Businesses with past success built upon the quality and innovation of their products may falter if their concept of service (repair break/fix) is only as a support to the manufacturing operation. However if the quality and innovation of product is supported by a similar level of quality and innovation in service, this can provide an excellent way to build and sustain long-term relationships.  Retaining customers means that a reputation has to be sustained over an extended period, and the service aspect of the relationship can provide a bridge should there be a problem with a faulty product. If the concept of service has evolved simply from one of reducing the cost of manufacturing errors, and does not focus on the optimum value derived by the customer from the application of the product, the relationship may not be sufficiently robust to resist a stress. This is best illustrated in figure 1, which shows the effort required to build satisfaction in a product into long-term loyalty. Unless satisfaction and loyalty are high, the value of a customer as a promoter is minimal, but promotion by a customer will have immense value.

Service Economics is not intended as a buzz phrase it is an attempt to explain service in terms that the Board will fully align with and recognise as valuable. The aim of our research and the topic of the "Executive Summit -Service Economics" is to develop further understanding and develop the new economic rule book to play by when defining a sustainable service strategy and running a successful service business.