On 30 September 2025, senior service executives from across the industrial sector gathered Gebhardt Group Sinsheim for the latest Si2 Service Leaders Network (SLN) meeting. Hosted by Si2, the summit focused on how industrial product companies can design and implement effective service agreements that drive customer value, strengthen internal alignment, and build sustainable, profitable growth.
The SLN has become a distinctive forum for open dialogue—where service leaders exchange practical insights and lessons learned from the front line. This year’s discussions reflected the realities of a world where cost structures and supply chains are under pressure, and where maintaining margins and customer relationships has become more challenging than ever. In such a context, service contracts are proving to be one of the most effective tools not only for revenue growth but also for margin stability and customer loyalty.
Among the highlights was a compelling case study from Georg SAHM GmbH, presented by Martina Krengel, Head of Service. Her story showed how a structured approach to Service Level Agreements (SLAs) can transform service from a reactive cost centre into a strategic, value-generating business.
Leadership Commitment: The Foundation for Service Contract Excellence
The summit opened with a shared recognition that service transformation begins at the top. Without active sponsorship from senior management, even the best service initiatives struggle to gain traction.
However, participants also emphasised that service leaders must champion their own cause internally. Service should not be viewed as an after-sales obligation, but as a driver of customer satisfaction, resilience, and growth. To achieve this shift, service teams need to engage in deliberate internal marketing—making their achievements visible and quantifying their impact on the company’s success.
As one executive put it, “If we don’t market service internally, we can’t expect the rest of the business to see its strategic potential.”
The message was clear: service must speak the language of business value, both inside and outside the company.
Building Clarity: The Pillars of an Effective Service Framework
Another recurring theme was the need for clarity. To build credible, scalable service models, organisations must clearly define five interlocking dimensions:
The strategic role of service in the company’s growth agenda.
Customer needs, and how they evolve with digitalisation and sustainability pressures.
The enabling technologies—from IoT and analytics to AI—that shape future service delivery.
The necessary resources and skills to execute consistently.
And finally, the KPIs and management tools that ensure transparency and control.
Without this foundation, service operations risk fragmentation—unable to scale or to demonstrate tangible value.
Speaking the Language of Value
Throughout the day, one question kept resurfacing: Do we talk to our customers about features, or about value?
Many companies still position service in terms of technical details—response times, spare part logistics, availability percentages—without translating those metrics into financial impact. Yet, as participants noted, CFOs and decision-makers think in euros, not features.
The group discussed how shifting from operational metrics to business outcomes—for example, from “uptime percentage” to “production hours gained” or “downtime costs avoided”—makes value tangible and measurable. In short, storytelling must include defined value proposition: i.e the tangible and quanitified benefit of the service. When service is expressed in economic terms, it becomes a far stronger proposition both for customers and for internal decision-makers.
Understanding the Maturity Journey
Using Si2’s Service Portfolio Check, participants assessed their own organisations’ maturity across four levels—Beginner, Climber, Leader, and Excellence.
At the early stages, service is reactive and ad hoc, often emerging as a by-product of product support. As companies climb the ladder, they introduce structure, standardisation, and defined responsibilities. Leaders establish dedicated service units, clear portfolios, and measurable performance indicators. At the highest level—Excellence—service becomes a globally managed profit centre, integrated with strategy and accountable for results.
For many attending companies, the exercise highlighted a familiar gap: they had moved beyond “Climber” status but had not yet reached full “Leader” maturity. Legacy systems, unclear accountability, and insufficient cross-functional cooperation were common barriers to progress.
The SAHM Story: Turning Contracts into Transformation
A particularly powerful example came from Georg SAHM GmbH, a mid-sized machinery manufacturer. In her presentation “Our SLA Story: Motivators and Challenges”, Martina Krengel described how SAHM built a structured SLA model that aligned strategy, process, and people around a shared vision of value creation.
The journey began in early 2024, driven by three key motivators: rising customer demand for predictable support, the need for better capacity planning, and a strategic ambition to make service measurable and profitable.
SAHM’s first step was a kick-off workshop on service contracts, supported by Si2 and a VDMA seminar on “Successful Sales of Service Offerings.” The team defined core building blocks: service specifications, pricing logic, warranty extensions, and contract templates. Crucially, they secured budget approval and management backing, ensuring that the project was recognised as a strategic priority rather than a side initiative.
By mid-2024, SAHM had created the backbone of its SLA processes—calculation tools, legal templates, and ERP integration. The sales team was brought in early to co-develop offers such as Basic Care packages, spare-part bundles, and remote support options. To embed this change, the company invested in soft-skills training through the SAHM Academy, helping technicians and sales staff communicate value more effectively.
In late 2024, the company launched marketing activities—web pages, flyers, and customer outreach campaigns—followed by a pilot phase in January 2025. The results were rapid and positive: customer feedback was enthusiastic, internal motivation grew, and the first SLAs were successfully sold, particularly for spare-part packages. Service capacity planning became linked to contractual commitments, and transparent KPIs were introduced to track performance.
By mid-2025, SAHM had elevated its service organisation into a dedicated Business Unit Service + Spare Parts, fully integrated with commercial operations. The benefits extended beyond new revenues: cooperation between teams improved, and financial steering became more robust.
As Krengel reflected, “Contracts were just the starting point. The real value came from aligning our people, processes, and planning around those agreements.”
Her story became a reference point for other SLN participants—a demonstration that even in medium-sized firms, structured processes and leadership alignment can rapidly transform service maturity.
Integrating Product and Service: Thinking in Systems
The SAHM example underscored a wider industry trend: customers increasingly expect integrated solutions that combine hardware, software, and services into a seamless performance package.
“Service is an attitude,” one participant observed—a mindset that crosses functional boundaries. In such organisations:
Engineers design products with serviceability in mind.
Service teams feed customer insights back into innovation.
Sales positions service not as a giveaway, but as a performance enabler.
This integrated thinking supports the rise of outcome-based models, such as pay-per-use or pay-on-production, where value is defined by customer success rather than product ownership.
Understanding the Ecosystem
Discussions also highlighted that service contracts do not exist in isolation. Every industrial firm operates within a specific ecosystem—a network of OEMs, integrators, dealers, and end users that shape how value is delivered.
Recognising who the key players are, how they interact, and what each contributes to the customer outcome is vital for designing realistic, differentiating agreements. Digital tools can support this transparency, but clarity of roles and shared objectives remains essential.
Agreements as Alignment Tools
At the summit, the word “Vereinbarungen”—agreements—took on a broader meaning. It referred not only to customer contracts, but also to the internal agreements that align teams around shared goals.
When service and sales, or management and field teams, commit to common KPIs, feedback loops, and collaboration rules, the organisation moves from coordination to genuine partnership. Such alignment, participants agreed, is the real foundation of service excellence.
The Human Factor: Skills, Culture, and Communication
While systems and contracts create structure, it is people who make service transformation succeed. The summit reaffirmed that leadership behaviours and organisational culture are decisive factors.
Cross-functional communication, recognition of service achievements, and continuous learning through internal academies are critical enablers. Participants also noted the growing importance of soft skills—empathy, negotiation, storytelling—as well as self-management in demanding, customer-facing roles.
As the SAHM case illustrated, when teams feel recognised and empowered, service becomes not just a job, but a shared mission.
Patterns of Success
Across all the discussions and company examples, clear patterns of success emerged. High-performing organisations tend to:
Develop structured, lifecycle-aligned service portfolios.
Build transparent controlling systems for profitability.
Combine standardisation with modular flexibility.
Measure outcomes from the customer’s perspective.
Continuously develop technical and commercial capabilities.
These characteristics reinforce the idea that service excellence is not accidental—it is designed, nurtured, and managed.
From Learning to Action
To ensure that the summit’s insights translate into real progress, Si2 launched “Collaboration Projects”—peer-learning groups where participants collaborate on specific topics. Each team will hold its first review in November 2025 and present results at the next SLN Summit in February 2026.
This structured follow-up reflects the SLN’s DNA: co-creation, practical experimentation, and continuous improvement.
Service: A Catalyst for Growth
Ultimately, the Sinsheim summit reaffirmed Si2’s purpose—to act as a catalyst for growth and customer value creation in industrial markets. By combining strategic insight with practical tools like the Service Portfolio Check and Service Agreement Canvas, Si2 helps organisations translate ideas into results.
The Road Ahead
Looking forward, participants saw three priorities shaping the future of industrial service:
Professionalisation – building globally managed, data-driven service businesses.
Value Communication – articulating economic outcomes, not just technical performance.
Cultural Integration – embedding a service mindset across every function.
As volatility and competition increase, service is becoming a strategic anchor. The SAHM case showed that even modest beginnings can lead to powerful transformation when leadership, structure, and culture align.
From Agreements to Advantage
The 2025 SLN Summit made one thing clear: service agreements are more than commercial documents. They are catalysts for alignment, trust, and long-term partnership—internally and externally.
As Martina Krengel concluded:
“Our SLAs made service measurable, but they also made service visible—and that changed everything.”
By turning service into a visible, valued, and measurable force, industrial companies can move from reacting to opportunities to creating them—and truly leverage services to win in industrial markets.
