Facilitated by Professor Mairi McIntyre from the University of Warwick, the workshop explored service innovation processes that help us understand what makes our customers successful.
In particular, the Customer Value Iceberg principle goes beyond the typical Total Cost of Ownership view of the equipment world and explores how that equipment impacts the success of the business. It forces us to consider not only direct costs associated with usage of the equipment such but also indirect costs such as working capital and risks.
As an example, we looked at how MAN Truck UK used this method to develop services that went beyond the prevailing repairs, parts and maintenance to methods (through telematics and clever analytics) to monitor and improve the performance and fuel consumption of their trucks. This approach helped grow their business by an order of magnitude over a number of years.
We then took a deep dive into how Endress + Hauser have developed applications that can mine Service Management data to improve service performance:
Thomas Fricke (Service Manager) and Enrico De Stasio (Head of Corporate Quality & Lean) facilitated a 3 hour discussion on their journey from idea to a real working application integrated into their Service processes. These were the key learning points that emerged:
In 2018 the Senior leadership concluded that to stay competitive they needed to do far more to consolidate their global service data into a “data lake’ that could be used to improve their own service processes and bring more value to customers. As a company they had already seen the value of organising data as over the past 20 years for every new system they already had a “digital twin” which held electronically all the data for that system in an organised fashion. Initially, it was basic Bill of Material data, but has since grown in sophistication. So a good start but they needed to go further, and the leadership team committed resources to do this.
Regarding AI, our task was to uncover some of the myths and benefits for service businesses and the first task was to agree on what we really mean by AI among the participants. It took time, but we discovered that there are really two interpretations which makes the term rather confusing. The first is a generic term used by visionaries and AI professionals to describe a world of intelligent machines and applications. Important at a social & macroeconomic level, but perhaps not so useful for business operations -at least at a practical level. The second is an umbrella term for a group of technologies that are good at finding patterns in large data sets (machine learning, neural networks, big data, computer vision), that can interface with human beings (Natural Language Processing) and that mimic human intelligence through being based on self-learning algorithms. Understanding this second definition and how these technologies can be used to overcome real business challenges is where the immediate value of AI sits for today’s businesses. It was also clear that the implication of integrating these technologies into business processes will require leaders to look at the change management challenges for their teams and customers.
To understand options for moving ahead at a practical level we first looked briefly at Husky through an interview with CIO Jean-Christophe Wiltz to CIOnet where we learned that i) real business needs should tailored drive technology implementation, and ii) that before getting to AI technologies, there is a need to build the appropriate infrastructure in terms of database and data collection, and, most importantly, the need to be prepared to continually adapt this infrastructure as the business needs change.
“Service thrives on exchange – and on joint thinking
Last week, we hosted Si2-Group ‘s Service Leader Network Summit at our plant in Sinsheim-Dühren. It was a great pleasure for us to welcome 15 service experts from the industrial engineering sector with many years of experience.
✨ The highlight of the event was – as always – the open and in-depth professional exchange. This time, the focus was on drafting service contracts with real added value for our customers. The different perspectives, approaches and practical examples provided valuable impulses and once again showed how much we can learn from each other.
💡 It was particularly exciting for us to gain insights into the approaches of our service colleagues. From this, we take away many new ideas for our own service business and at the same time the confirmation that we have already achieved a lot in many areas and are on the right track.
🤝 Such formats are incredibly inspiring and motivating. They not only strengthen the network, but also the common conviction that excellent service is a key success factor in industrial engineering.
What are your personal experiences with networking events of this kind?
Many thanks to Si2 and all participants for the open exchange.
We are already looking forward to the next follow-up events!”