Rosanne Gresnigt and Hilbrand Rustema at specialist service management consultancy Noventum tackle one of the big challenges all field service organizations face - aligning the core functions of service and sales...

It’s one of the questions we hear so often. How can a company build a scalable service sales and delivery model? With increased commoditisation, pressure on growth and margins are forcing companies to think outside the box when it comes to their services.

Service businesses need savvy innovation programmes, which allow them to evolve quickly and nimbly – they need to create new customer-oriented offerings, quickly adapting to changing markets. However, navigating the right path to service transformation isn’t always straightforward. Most common approaches, Big Bang and Incremental, carry risks and yield surprisingly low success rates.

There’s an alternate path, however, increasingly being adopted by today’s more successful and forward-looking service organizations: ‘The Service Factory’.

The Service Factory approach is an agile, systematic, highly successful, low-risk approach to service transformations enabling companies to adopt innovations in tandem with today’s fast-changing customer and market needs.

How does it work?

The Service Factory approach is an analogy to an actual factory and consists of three core steps:

• Creating and maintaining a high-level vision of the future for your business with a defined portfolio of services that you want to offer to your customers
• Defining a precise architecture of your business model components that you need to sell and deliver the services in the portfolio
• Defining a roadmap in which the components are improved step-by-step according to new and changing requirements

In further detail, having developed a high-level vision of your organization’s future services portfolio, the approach requires that you break down your business into sales and delivery model components; Request Management, Diagnosis, Planning, Maintenance Engineering and Knowledge Management are examples of valuable components in your Service Factory.

Each component is then looked at from the following perspectives:

• Management Practices
• Processes
• Performance Metrics
• IT functionality

Businesses implementing this approach must:

• Have a clear vision of how the business will develop in years to come.
• Set out well-defined long-term business objectives
• Develop an understanding of what components are required and what they should look like.

Using this holistic approach, businesses can embark on an ongoing process whereby a new component is implemented every 6-8 weeks.

As such, the Service Factory is a high-paced, focused approach involving fixing, raising and maturing the level of the business, component by component.

Where to begin?

A thorough assessment of the business is a good place to begin.

Companies can start by benchmarking Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) like Customer Experience, Productivity, Gross Profit Margins and Growth Rates against top performers in their industry and proven standards.

This will enable the company to identify what the biggest areas for improvement are. As a next step, a more qualitative assessment can help to identify the root causes of under-performance and best practices.

By prioritizing the opportunities that are derived from such assessment, based on time/complexity to implement and expected added value for the company, a service transformation roadmap can be created.By prioritizing the opportunities that are derived from such assessment, based on time/complexity to implement and expected added value for the company, a service transformation roadmap can be created.

As Europe’s leading Service Management experts, Noventum has developed a comprehensive library of industry benchmarks and best practice industry standards for components covering all the major capabilities of a Service Factory.

They are developed and updated frequently based on our research activities and our work with leading service businesses across the globe.

Start with Self Assessment:

To help you move forward we're pleased to offer you access to our free online self-assessment tool which covers a limited scope of functional service business areas which is available @ www.noventum.eu/fsm-assessment-demo

This assessment will take approximately 30 minutes of your time and then upon completion of the assessment, you will directly gain access to your personalized report of opportunities that could help you to improve your own business and get your sales and service operations more closely aligned.

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