Service Contracts: A Catalyst for Value Growth

SLN Summit

30th September 2025: GEBHARDT Intralogistics Group, Sinsheim, Germany

Service Leaders Network

The Service Leaders Network builds on the exchange of experience and insights as well as collaboration between members in common projects to build stronger capabilities and knowledge among participants, drive performance, master challenges and solve problems.

Find out more about the Service Leaders Network

Summit at a Glance

The goals of this summit for this small select group of service professionals are to gain new insights into how to use Service Contracts as a strategic lever to increase both service revenues and margins.

The Summit will run from 08.30-1700 on the 30th September 2025. There will be an informal dinner the night before to allow attendees to get to know each other.

The participation fee is 500Euro which covers all summit costs including dinner, lunch and refreshments.

Location: GEBHARDT Intralogistics Group, Riedacker 2, 74889 Sinsheim-Dühren, Deutschland.

Accomodation: We have secured a special rate of 110euro/night including parking and breakfast at the Hotel Sinsheim · In d. Au 25, 74889 Sinsheim, Deutschland. They can be contacted on +49 7261 40640. Please quote Si2-Group when you make your booking.

Focus and Topics

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 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.

Agenda 30th September

The Summit style will be a flexible & informal workshop format with the following proposed agenda. If you would like amendments or to include some specific points, please let us know.
Si2 will host an informal dinner on the 29th September at 7pm  for attendees who arrive the day before the event. It’s an opportunity to get to know each other. If you can arrive earlier, we have also arranged a private tour of  the famous Technik Museum 16.30 – 1800 which is only a couple of minutes from the hotel. It’s collection of iconic aircraft, cars and even a U-Boat, will appeal to those of you who enjoy technology. 

8.30     Welcome and first discussion on your priorities & expectations 

9.30     Service Level Agreements for equipment manufacturers: Martina Krengel, Georg Sahm GmbH & Co.KG

    • Experience exchange and Facilitated Workshop

1200     Morning review / Plan for the afternoon

12.15    Lunch & Network

13.30    Service Agreements in Product and 3rd party solution providers

    •    Experience Exchange and Facilitated Workshop

 

1500      Moderated workshop: How to start and how to minimise resistance

16.00    How can the SLN help you with these challenges

    • Collaboration Projects and Experience exchanges
    • Next steps and potential collaboration projects

 

16.50    Wrap up / Feedback / Questions

17.00    Summit End

Want to talk to Si2 for more information, or register for the event, then click the button below.

CONTACT US for questions or registration

Further information on the venue and the logistics will be sent to you after registration.

Expert Practitioners Backgrounds and Interests

Martina Krengel: Head of Service, Georg Sahm GmbH 

The service organization of Georg Sahm GmbH & Co. KG supports over 1,000 customers worldwide with more than 2,500 installed systems integrated into process plants. These systems are critical to operations, so ensuring high availability is essential.

Martina Krengel has been leading the Sahm service organization for several years and is responsible for the commercial execution of all service orders. She also oversees the profitability of this business unit.

To strengthen profitability while further enhancing customer service, Martina initiated and successfully implemented the development of the Sahm Service Level Agreements. She is well acquainted with the challenges and pitfalls involved in building such a Service Level Agreement portfolio.

Martina is happy to share her experiences with us, offering valuable insights into the opportunities and obstacles she and her team faced—including the implementation process and discussions with customers.

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.