Performance Management

The ongoing pressure on margins due to commoditisation of products and product related services has an increasing impact on the required productivity of the service delivery. An annual productivity improvement of 5-10% is not enough to maintain profitablity of product related services. 

Traditionally, professional service businesses are run by a professional in some domain, like lawyers or consultants, which are often pretty focussed on their area of expertise. A major challenge is to increase the quality of the service delivery, differentiating service offerings and a consistent brand with branded customer experience.

Customer support centres are becoming more and more important due to the continuously evolving technology and the possibility to offer your customers more remote services.

The growth of customer support centres asks for adequate and responsible supervisors. This course is intended for supervisors or teamleaders of support centres who want to improve their practical skills to drive team success.

In the battle to stand out in the market, many businesses are increasingly seeing service offerings as an alternative competitive strategy to low-margin price competition or costly pure product innovation. The role of the field service manager is changing and  effective management of field service supervisors becomes crucial in the performance of the field service operation.

Objectives

Increasing competitive pressures have a major impact on the daily job of a service operations manager. Field service managers must be able to manage in an environment of highly skilled, technical people. 

As Europe’s economic fortunes plummet, effective management of your service business becomes integral to ensuring profit. Amidst increased pressure to deliver a mature service capability, the financial status quo provides the opportunity to review your modus operandi and embrace powerful new incentives to enact a total service transformation. Without good leadership however, new initiatives tend to veer off track. Leadership is, more often than not, the major differentiating factor in a company’s level of success. The question becomes: What makes a successful leader in the services and how do you lead your company to profitable growth? At Noventum, our consultants have defined four priorities to first-rate service leadership; a good Strategy, focus on the Customer Experience, attention to the virtues of (what we call) the Service Factory, and developing your Employees’ skills and understanding. These considerations will be addressed through our executive Service Leadership Course.

The current rapidly changing environment demands much greater reliance on the quality and calibre of individuals for example  developing engineers as trusted advisors; beyond requiring that they adapt to technology and activity management, and the expectation that mobile solutions will provide effective command and control to support structure and processes.  Managing activities is important when productivity and cost reduction are in focus, and strong leadership will be necessary to ensure that, delivery of leading-edge service achieves all its objectives across a wide range of measures to include customer loyalty, engineer loyalty, process quality and deployment, as well as cost constraints.

A significant challenge for many service organisations is to improve the capability of their managers and staff; this is not simply a training issue, and acknowledging a lack of capability does not necessarily reflect poor or limited training, but is a more complex issue which companies are having to get to terms with in order to grow cost-effectively while retaining existing and seeking out new customers.

Recently a group of senior executives and directors gathered together at the Service & Maintenance Congress 2011, in the Netherlands, where they had the opportunity to debate key challenges around staff and powerful people performance.

As Marco van Duijnhoven, Director, SSCD Europe Cisco said:
"Having a strong brand is a good start to attract talent, but competing for talent in the current market place will require more than that. What is it you have to offer as a company that will help you Attract, Retain and Develop the talent for the future?"

As Jos Bulter, Service Manager Consumer Production Miele said:
"The personal properties (such as communication and attitude) that suits our Brand have become more critical than the technical skills. Nevertheless the level of their technical skills are still the same."

Their best staff are: Trusted Advisors - because they can provide customers, colleagues and managers with good advice and powerful support; they know their customers, they are commercially aware and are very good communicators. 

How does your top team measure up with other best-in-class organisations? Complete your own sample assessment and see how simply it demonstrates your areas of strength, and areas for development.

Assess your team now by taking the sample Competence Assessment framework. The url link will then be sent to your email address. The results of the assessment will give you a clear indication of how your team fairs with other top teams. Noventum will be happy to discuss your people performance needs and can work with you to raise the calibre of your teams.

Mergers and Acquisitions (M&A), are they an effective approach to value creation?

The main purpose of M&A is to add value to shareholders, based on the assumption that to merge or make an acquisition will produce higher corporate potential value than the value of the two separate companies.

The logic is quite simple: Companies can benefit from combining the two companies in fixed cost reduction available from economies of scale. Most examples involve purchase of a competitor; or companies in similar core activities, however, evidence from different source, highlights that only one in three M&A deals achieves the expected increased corporate value. Recent research reveals results were even worse in Europe: in the last three years, less than one in ten transactions can be considered successful.

Performance measurement is generally used to control and increase the performance of employees. Unfortunately, performance measurement does not always work out as planned. Therefore, Noventum Service Management in collaboration with the University of Twente, will investigate how performance measurement leads to better results of service employees. We are specifically focusing our research on the importance of employee involvement in designing the performance indicators for measurement of their performance.

Does your company use individual or group performance indicators to measure the performance of service employees? Would you like to learn how performance measurement can be done more effectively? Then we invite you to participate in this interesting research. We really value your contribution to our research and we will be delighted to send you a copy of the research results in return. These results may give you new insights on how performance measurement of employees can be improved to maximize the output of your employees and enhance service excellence and profits within your organisation.