Why I Keep Coming Back to the Si2 Service Leaders Network Summit

Extracts from an interview with Martina Krengel, Head of Service at Georg Sahm GmbH, who has been an expert practitioner at three Si2 Summit’s.

1. Why did you choose to attend the Si2 Summit?

For me, it started with trust. After working closely with the Si2 team on several service transformation projects, I knew they created an environment where people could openly share experiences and learn from one another. I was excited by the opportunity to contribute my own experiences with service-level agreements while also learning from other service leaders facing similar challenges. What appealed to me most was that it was a genuine dialogue, not just a series of presentations.

2. What did you personally get out of the event?

One of the biggest benefits was realising that we are not alone. Regardless of the industry or the products we manufacture, many service organisations face the same challenges. Hearing how others approach those challenges gave me fresh ideas and practical insights that I could take back and apply within my own organisation. Every event has provided new perspectives and new impulses for improving our service business.

3. What did you hope your SLN colleagues got from the event?

I hoped they would gain practical insights from our own service transformation journey. In particular, I wanted to demonstrate that service success requires strong management support, a clear strategy, and sufficient resources. Service cannot succeed in isolation; it needs to be positioned as a strategic priority across the business.

4. What went well?

The format worked exceptionally well. The group was the perfect size—large enough to bring diverse perspectives but small enough to encourage open and honest discussion. The networking dinner the evening before helped build relationships and trust, which made the conversations the next day much more productive. I also appreciated the balance between practical case studies, interactive discussions, and proven frameworks. It never felt theoretical; everything was grounded in real experience.

5. What would you tell a colleague about attending an Si2 Summit?

I would strongly encourage them to attend. Every Summit delivers new ideas, new connections, and new learning opportunities. The discussions are highly relevant, the participants are willing to share openly, and the insights are immediately applicable. Most importantly, you leave with the confidence that others are facing similar challenges and that together we can learn faster, improve faster, and create greater value through services. That sense of community and shared learning is what makes the Service Leaders Network so valuable.

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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.