“Increase availability of assets by 20% at a 20% lower cost.” This is the value the UK’s Ministry of Defence(MOD) estimate they have saved through developing availability contracts for their complex assets such as ships and fighter aircraft.

Your customers are trying to get to the same destination, and your challenge is to provide a map and make money at the same time. Some of you may look for guidance from articles such as this one, delving into books or going to conferences. I bet none of you have ever looked at a British Standards Institute publication for guidance on managing your service business.

Yet one does exist. Written by leading thinkers from the MOD, Rolls Royce, BAE and UK Universities, PAS280 was sponsored by Innovate UK, and provides companies with a framework on how to organise a Service Business through the full life cycle of a complex product or asset. These organisations willingly shared their intellectual know-how, because their supply chains of UK SME’s are struggling to adapt to these new service led business models. The result is a practitioner led framework that captures the best thinking in the UK from which we can all learn and accelerate our own journeys.

The Common TES Framework as it is called is shown in the diagram below:

© British Standards Institution 2018

Organisational Capabilities

These are the internal business and technical attributes a business must have in order to be successful, which can be broken down into 4 levels:

• Business Context and policies: Leadership is key to success and so the strategic direction, the business models to follow and the level of investment are key starting points for developing a services strategy.
  
  
• Organisational Readiness: Making the shift from product to service thinking requires a shift in culture, people, processes and technologies. Often this readiness is developed through a co-creation process with the customer and piloting projects before scaling.
  
  
• Enabling Capabilities: Especially in today’s fast moving world there are 3 key areas to consider

1. Knowledge: Successful service businesses come from capturing knowledge about how solutions work to be able to predict future performance, reduce risk and ensure profitability.
2. Tools & Standards: become more important the larger the organisation
3. Digital Technologies: As knowledge is a key enabler, so are the technologies that enable data to be gathered (IoT), the analytics to make sense of data, as well as the modelling (Digital Twins) that makes it easier to action data.
   
   

• Planning Activities: The project management, budgeting and planning expertise required to drive successful change is especially important in large organisations dealing with billion pound programmes. However, SME should not discount this activity as it is important in managing profitability.

Value Streams

The Value Streams in essence is how the OEM’s make money, and the service value propositions they offer their customers. For most business’s this should be the starting point of their journey as it is the mechanism that pays for the investment. Organisations can look at value through 4 different lenses:

• Convert: Most of you would know this value stream as the “Service Sales process”, where the experience and knowledge of the provider is transferred into a value proposition which the Asset User purchases. Often this is most effectively done through a co-creation processes between the asset user and the asset supplier. The more complex the products, the deeper the co-creation.
• Avoid: Value streams ensures the asset is best placed to deliver its maximum value potential over its life at a minimum level of cost. In effect this means designing service into the product/asset at the design stage. For complex assets this might be identifying performance degradation curves and failure modes, then developing solutions to deal with the challenges. For less complex assets such as capital equipment it will be to develop integrated product and service solutions that meet the customer’s needs. Offering predictive solutions would be an example.
• Contain: Value streams are those which minimise the loss of value if there is a failure. For example, ensuring there are regular inspections, routine maintenance or monitoring asset health.
• Recover: Once a module or sub-system is no longer functional, how can it be restored to meet it’s functional and performance requirements. This includes upgrades for new capability and also actions to overcome obsolescence risks.

Execution Processes

The execution processes apply to activities and resources that are required to deliver the support services and which include people, processes, facilities and support tools. They highlight the importance of planning support through the full lifecycle if the product.

• Develop: Is especially important for complex assets such as a train, which require detailed planning, especially around the business case and risk, before the solution is ready to be created and deployed.
• Prepare: The service solution is created, tested and scaled in preparation to be rolled out to customers
• Utilize: These are the processes that deliver the support during in-service operations of the asset. Currently this will be where most of your effort will be. However, as you deliver more advanced service solutions, so you must put more work into the Develop and Prepare phases.
• Retire: For complex assets such as Nuclear Power Stations and aircraft, a key consideration. With an increasing emphasis on environmental concerns, this phase is becoming more important for all manufacturers and customers.

This is a very quick whistle stop tour of the BSI standard. By going into more detail, you will be able to gain deeper insight and so be more effective in your own services journey. There are three takeaway actions you might want to consider:

1. Google PAS 280 and you can download from the BSI e-shop: Through-life engineering services – Adding business value through a common framework – Guide. It is free for the moment.
   
   
2. If you want to develop your people, then Contact Cranfield University who offer a Masters Degree Apprenticeship in Through Life Engineering Services and you can find more information; https://www.cranfield.ac.uk/courses/taught/throughlife-system-sustainment-mastership
   
   
3. If you want to explore how this thinking can help your business, then contact Nick Frank at nick.frank@Si2partners.com who as a member of the PAS steering committee, is now organising workshops helping SME’s leverage this excellent framework.
   
   

Permission to reproduce extracts from PAS280 is granted by BSI. British Standards can be obtained in PDF or hard copy formats from the BSI online shop: www.bsigroup.com/Shop or by contacting BSI Customer Services for hardcopies only: Tel: +44 (0)20 8996 9001, Email: cservices@bsigroup.com.