3rd Contracts SLN event announced for 23.April

Within an increasingly uncertain world, cost structure and supply chains are having to adapt. Margin growth and maintaining business is a priority. Many Service leaders are now looking to extract more value from their instal base and Service Contracts have proved to be a useful proposition to not only to grow revenues, but also margins.

The Summit will enable “German Speaking” Service managers and service providers to discuss their current situation and challenges with a view of  developing  solutions to the following questions:

  • WHY are service agreements strategically more important than ever?
  • HOW can they become a tool for increased sales or better margins,or maximum customer loyalty?
  • WHAT: What should your service agreements achieve?
    • Ensure customer collaboration?
    • Achieve more with fewer variants?
    • Make the added value transparent to sales and customers?

 

Are Service Agreements a Silver Bullet for value creation?

Service agreements require a sufficiently detailed description of their contents—this forms the foundation for accurate costing. They must also be standardized to allow for quick and easy creation, offer clarity, and ensure reliable delivery. To achieve this, the right tools are essential. The design must not be overly complex—gaining acceptance internally (from sales and service) and externally (from customers) is critical.

These are challenges—but also opportunities—that many companies face.


Are you ready to take them on?

This event is designed for doers—people open to fresh ideas, eager to participate in discussions, and willing to explore bold questions. In active dialogues and hands-on sessions with peers, you’ll uncover practical insights and actionable methods to structure service agreements tailored to your organization.

Through intense discussion and pragmatic methods, you’ll walk away with:

  • Simple and effective ways to design service agreements

  • Strategies to foster internal and customer buy-in

  • Tools to manage service agreements efficiently

  • Clarity on the value they create for both customer and company

Listen and discuss real experiences

Martina Krengel, Head of Service, invites you to join her in an honest conversation about:

  • Why she championed the development of Service Level Agreements

  • The challenges she encountered

  • The problems they had to solve

  • How they gained internal and customer acceptance

  • How her team engages with customers and builds success

Together in workshops, we’ll explore concrete approaches that will help you create successful service agreements.

 

Why Should You Attend?


You’ll work in a focused environment alongside 10–15 fellow service managers and practitioners in small, productive sessions. Take stock of your current position, exchange ideas, and develop tangible approaches to apply in your everyday business.

You’ll also build valuable new relationships—contacts you can turn to for future exchanges or collaboration.

We will discuss the challenges, and the opportunities, that many companies face.

For more information use these links in English and German

Service in Industry

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Service Innovation for value-driven opportunities:

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.

Mining Service Management Data to improve performance

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:

Leadership

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.

  • The first try: The project initially focused on collecting and organising data from its global service operations into a data lake.  This first phase required the development of infrastructure, processes and applications that could analyse service report data and turn it into actionable intelligence. The initial goal was to make internal processes more efficient, and so improve the customer experience. E+H looked for patterns in the reports of service engineers that could:
    • Be used to improve the performance of Service through processes and individuals
    • Be used by other groups such as engineering to improve and enhance product quality.
  • Outcome: Eventhough progress was made in many areas, nevertheless, even using advanced statistical methods, they could not extract or deliver the value they had hoped   for from the data. They needed to look at something different.
  • Leveraging AI technologies: The Endress+Hauser team knew they needed to look for patterns in large data sets. They had the knowledge that self-learning technologies that are frequently termed as AI, could potentially help solve this problem. They teamed up with a local university and created a project to develop a ‘Proof of Concept’. This helped the project gain traction as the potential of the application they had created started to emerge. It was not an easy journey and required “courage to trust the outcomes, see them fail and then learn from the process”. However after about 18 months they were able to integrate the application into their normal working processes where every day they scan the service reports from around the world in different languages to identify common patterns in product problems, or anomalies in the local service team activities. This information is fed back to the appropriate service teams for action. The application also acts as a central hub where anyone in the organisation can access and interrogate service report data to improve performance and develop new value propositions.
  • Improvement:  The project does not stop there. It is now embedded in the service operations and used as a basic tool for continuous improvement. In effect, this has shifted the whole organization to be more aware of the value of their data.

Utilizing AI in B2B services

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.