Tag: #installedbase

Digital Thread: How the Service Bill of Materials Enables Cross-selling & Upselling

It’s 2010, and an OEM has asked me to blueprint their after-sales organization. I went to our sales executive and asked, “What do we tell our customers about life expectancy and maintenance costs when we sell the product?” He looked at me with a confused look.

Why is this important? Because, if you want to cross-sell and upsell services in the after-sales domain, you need to know what value was promised when the product was sold. This is where the service manual and the Service Bill of Materials come into play.

This blog is part 3 in a series of three:

The value promise of the product sale

My sales executive sold complex capital equipment. For each product in his portfolio, engineering provided him with technical specifications describing the output capabilities. He would ask customers for their intended use profile and select the model that had a matching output bandwidth. To not complicate his CapEx sale, he would avoid a conversation on:

  • How many years will the product be able to sustain specified output levels?
  • What is the expected decline in output levels given the customer use profile?
  • What maintenance efforts are required to sustain product specifications?

Upon delivery and title passage of the product, the buyer would have access to the operator and service manual. These provided insights into the ‘size of effort’ required to use and sustain the product. If a total cost of ownership calculation were a prerequisite to the product sale, my sales executive would defer the calculation of the OpEx piece to the after-sales department.

Total cost of ownership

I’ll skip the semantics on if we should talk about the total cost of ownership or lifecycle cost. The idea is to create an understanding of what it costs to sustain the product over a prolonged period of time while maintaining output specifications.

Once more we can draw on the intellectual property and effort from engineering. As we’ve mentioned in part 1 of this series, the service manual describes the efforts needed to maintain nominal output specifications. To put it another way for the customer, “If you maintain your product as stated in this document, we, the OEM, guarantee the output specifications.” Thus, when we cost/price those activities, we have a pretty neat approximation of the OpEx piece of TCO.

Title passage

When an OEM is in the business of CapEx sales, it will have a title passage of products. Beyond title passage, all pains and gains of the product transfer to its owner. Now it is the responsibility of the owner to act upon the instructions in the service manual. Most likely there will be a clause saying that non-compliance with these instructions ‘may’ void OEM output level guarantees. There may be a clause that voids the warranty when non-authorized parties perform maintenance activities on the product.

This is where it gets interesting and dualistic at the same time! On the one hand, the OEM bestows the risk of owning the product onto the buyer. On the other hand, the OEM wants something from the product buyer post-title passage—“buy my maintenance services.”

This happens in a context where the owner of the product has the legal right to choose to follow the user manual instructions, to ignore or deviate from them. The owner can also choose to perform the activities themselves or to outsource. If your business model is driven by title passage, you can’t force a product buyer to buy associated services. You can only entice product owners to buy your services.

Cross and upsell

The first step to cross and upsell is establishing a baseline on what comes included with the product sale and what is extra. If the product is sold with a warranty, the warranty conditions will define what is included and what is not. It is important to clarify that a warranty is predominantly promising the correct working of the product. Not a ‘free pass’ to mitigate actual wear & tear as a result of using the product.

The second step to cross and upsell is having a conversation on how the owner will use the product. When the use is exactly as envisioned by engineering, then the operating and service manual will define the maintenance standard for sustaining the output specifications. When the customer uses the product in different settings, you may want to introduce ‘bundles’ of maintenance activities associated with low, medium, and high usage. Call them bronze, silver, or gold. For more granular services you may want to use a concept like a menu card.

Once you have jointly agreed on what maintenance activities are required to sustain output specifications given said use profile, the final step is defining who does what. This is a risk versus cost conversation. Either the product owner bears the cost and risk of using the product or those are outsourced to a service provider/OEM at an agreed price.

Companies that have a large installed base of products and trained internal technicians may choose to execute the service manual activities themselves. Others may evaluate the risk versus cost differently, and buy services ranging from preventive maintenance to full service. Mastering the risk/cost conversation in conjunction with intellectual capital captured in the Service-BoM and service manual will become your toolset for cross-selling and upselling.

Digital thread

In three blogs we’ve spotlighted the Service Bill of Materials through the lenses of cross & upsell, system of record, and linking engineering to service. We’ve seen the value of the digital thread spanning engineering, manufacturing, service, and sales—proving value across the entire product lifecycle.

This article is published on Field Service Digital.

Digital Thread: How the Service Bill of Materials Drives System of Record Across the Platform

“We’ve defined ERP as the system of record for our installed base”. This a phrase we hear quite often. Is it a smart choice, and what are the consequences of this choice? When you are in the business of managing the service lifecycle of an installed base, we believe you should consider an alternative approach to system of record.

This blog is part 2 in a series of three.

Limitations of ERP

ERP is often a solid choice for the system of record for many data objects. But lesser so for products, equipment and assets that have left the building. When products hit the field and start their operational lifecycle, those products become a handle for a lot of contextual usage data. Think in terms of how is the product being used, how is it being maintained, and what touch points have we had with the product?

Bill of Materials lifecycle

Let us paint a picture of the lifecycle of the Bill of Materials (BoM). In the design phase of a product, engineering will create an engineering BoM. In the build phase, manufacturing will pull the latest revision of the engineering BoM and use it as a template to manufacture a batch of x units. All those units have the same as-built. If we use a configurator in the sales process, the as-sold may differ from the as-built. So far the information we have captured is product specific.

Post-point-of-sales, when the unit leaves the building and the customer starts using the product, the unit becomes unique. Though the engineering team may have had a specific use profile in mind when designing the product, in real life, customers use the product within (or outside) a bandwidth of the product specifications. Tracking how customers maintain and operate the product thus becomes essential to keep the product running. Being in the operational lifecycle of a product we’ll refer to the BoM as as-maintained or as-operated.

Service lifecycle management (SLM), fit for purpose

If we have to name one single reason why any OEM should revisit their ERP installed base system of record paradigm, it is total product lifecycle cost.

For mission-critical assets, the lifetime Opex is a multiple of product expenditure Capex. Thus, if you want to make a valuable impact on the users/buyers of your products, you need to focus on the service lifecycle.

The SLM asset record is fit for purpose. SLM connects as-engineered, as-built, as-sold, and as-maintained. In part 1 of this series, we explained how the Service-BoM sets the standard of maintenance, underpinning the value promise of product uptime and sustenance. PLM, ERP, CRM, and FSM all add data to the digital thread of the product. SLM, being on the receiving end, defines the data master for products in the field.

Enterprise data architect

Knowing that it takes both product and usage-specific data attributes to keep products running, we’d like to better understand why we’ve defined ERP as the system of record for our installed base. Is this a dogmatic, pragmatic, or conscious decision?

In the decision-making process for enterprise software, there are two factions. The business persona and the IT persona. Both weigh decisions along different (internal) metrics. Though it may seem obvious to abandon the ERP mantra from a business perspective, IT may have sufficient counterarguments not to do so.

This is where we can/should call on the help of the enterprise data architect. The enterprise data architect is key to any system of record conversation. What is primary, and what is secondary? How does data flow from one business area to the next? Does any function own data or is every function contributing data to an enterprise pool of data? The enterprise architect will be able to weigh the arguments and weigh the value of data beyond the individual functions in an organization.

Value of Asset Data

Knowing that the value of asset data is only getting bigger and bigger, we believe we are at an interesting point in time to create a digital thread of data. Focused on keeping the world running. Using the Service-BoM as a pivot. Using SLM as a system of record.

In part 3 of this series, we’ll focus on value using Service BoM and SLM data to drive cross and upsell. Teaser: when you exert a lot of effort in designing, building, and selling products, how much effort do you want to put into generating margin contribution off your installed base?

This article is published on Field Service Digital.

Digital Thread: How the Service Bill of Materials Links Engineering to Service

When we embark on a digital transformation journey in the after-sales domain, where does the process start? With the sale of the product? Commissioning of the product? First service call? We believe the foundation for the design of your service delivery processes starts in engineering.

This blog is part 1 in a series of three.

The creation of the service manual

When Engineering designs a product, they have an intended use profile in mind. That use profile defines wear-and-tear. Subsequently, the maintenance engineering function will define mitigating strategies to maintain the output specifications of the product and to sustain/prolong its lifecycle. The results are typically captured in the service manual and the Service Bill of Materials (BoM).

The golden standard of service

In a recent engagement with a prospect of ours, we asked to see the service manual of a medium-complex product to scope the service delivery business processes. Our premise: we may upsell on the service manual and promise higher value, but when we deliver less, product continuity and lifecycle may be at risk. As such, the service manual can be seen as the golden standard of service delivery.

In the 165 page pdf-document, we found a wealth of information on what to do, when to do it, and how to do it. Bill-of-materials, serviceable parts, PM-frequencies and kits, recommended consumables and spare parts, installation parameters, calibration values, and MTBF rates. We got enthusiastic. If somebody in engineering created this document, how does it ‘flow’ to after-sales? What system of record does after-sales use to be able to act upon the information in the service manual?

Digital thread

In the last decade, we’ve seen a lot of digitization initiatives driving the transformation agenda. We’ve also seen that a lot of digital data is still created and collected in silos. Engineering is digitizing product lifecycle management (PLM), manufacturing is pursuing Computer-aided manufacturing (CAD), sales are rolling out customer relationship management (CRM) and service is reshaping field service management (FSM). But how do they link to one another? Isn’t the overarching value promise of digitization the sharing of data leading to 1+1=3?

If your organization is in the business of designing, manufacturing, selling, and servicing products, then all those functions are connected through a digital thread. The carrier of the thread is the product itself. Starting as an as-engineered and subsequently transitioning into an as-built, as-sold, and as-maintained. In each stage of the lifecycle, additional information is added to the thread. Zooming out, each function will look at the digital thread through a lens to increase the value proposition.

Design for service

In our engagement with the above-mentioned prospect, we were curious how much design-for-service thought was put into the engineering phase and how that information would shape the design of the service delivery processes. Though the wealth in 165 pages of the service manual was phenomenal, the service organization had not yet invested in processes to receive the engineering baton.

The opening paragraph of the service manual provided a great narrative to introduce the baton. “Congratulations on your purchase. To protect your investment and get maximum return, we’ve defined some handles for good husbandry. This manual contains the instructions to guarantee the nominal output over its technical lifecycle”. In other words, the service manual defines the golden standard of maintenance to underpin the value promise of the product sale[1].

What Engineering documented in the 165-page service manual can be condensed in the following picture. In the first column, we find the Service-BoM. The Service-BoM is a subset of the Engineering/Manufacturing BoM. It contains only those parts that are serviceable. The manual pre-empts what skills are required to perform that serviceable activity. Can it be done by the customer, does it require a skilled technician or should the part be swapped in the field to be repaired in a depot/repair center?

With the above information from maintenance engineering, service delivery has a great blueprint defining what output its business processes should deliver. Analogously, service sales has an anchor to model cross and upsell offerings for customers having needs beyond the baseline described in the service manual.

Design for improvement

The service manual also serves another very important purpose; improvement. Improvement in two directions. Engineering giving handles to service and service giving feedback to engineering. As an illustration, I’ll use the mean time between failures (MTBF) column in the above table.

When Engineering designs a product, they typically have an idea of the lifecycle/MTBF of used components. Those values initially are theoretical numbers. Call them Plan. When the product hits the field in larger numbers, empirical values will trickle in. Call them Actual. When Actual is within a narrow margin of Plan, we say this is expected behavior. When it falls outside the margin, we call it an outlier. Understanding the root cause of the delta between Plan and Actual will enable you to drive improvement by process design.

  • Maybe the product was not installed properly
  • Maybe the product was not used as intended
  • Maybe engineering was wrong
  • Maybe service delivery was not in line with the service manual
  • Maybe the customer pushed out a preventive maintenance cycle
  • Maybe non-approved spares have been used

Actionable Service-BoM

What started as a trivial ask “can you share the service manual of a medium complex product” resulted in a pivotal conversation bridging engineering and service. The service manual is no longer a static 165-page pdf-document sitting in a knowledge repository. It is now an actionable document driving improvement and value in both the service and engineering domains.

[1] When selling products with a transfer-of-title, the risk of maintaining the product transfers to the buyer. Thus, the buyer becomes responsible to mitigate that risk in order to continue receiving the outcome/value of the product. The buyer may purchase maintenance services from OEM or choose differently. Read further in part 3 of this Digital Thread series.

This article is published on Field Service Digital.

Where are my spares?

Last week the European field service community convened for the first time in large numbers at WBR Field Service in Amsterdam. We had a lot of catching up to do. Apart from topics addressing the next big thing, the down-to-earth conversations had a common theme: where are my spare parts? Covid-19, Ever Given, and geo-political instability are disrupting supply chains. As a result, our service engineers are struggling to keep the world running due to missing parts.

We apologize for the inconvenience

My colleague brought her car for regular service. Due to the unavailability of spares, her car was in repair for five weeks. In the meanwhile, she got a rental. Guess what that costs? Guess what it does to brand and customer experience?

My out-of-warranty high-tech desk lamp showed intermittent behavior ten months ago. Customer support told me that due to a shortage of tools and materials they could not help me other than putting me on hold. After many touch points and mounting emotional pressure, they’ve sent me a new lamp for free. Though relieved I finally have light again, I’m not sure about a repeat purchase.

Last week a heavy truck made an illegal u-turn on an important thoroughfare in our city, overturning multiple traffic lights. Due to supply chain disruptions, repair material is due to arrive in three months. Now the intersection is partially blocked and traffic during rush hour has to be managed by traffic officers. Can you imagine the traffic congestion and productivity hours lost?

Supply disruptions are here to stay

For many years we’ve taken smooth and lean supply chain execution for granted. As a result, most field service initiatives were about optimizing the labor component and deploying smart technology. Recent events trigger a wake-up call. Spares availability is back on the agenda.

For a lot of service organizations, spare parts cost is the second largest cost component after labor cost. With increasing and consistent supply chain disruptions, spare parts availability is becoming distractor number one. This is preventing organizations from keeping their installed base up and running. This is causing organizations to default on SLA and contractual obligations.

Of all the supply chain-related challenges, the two most discussed topics at WBR Amsterdam were:

  • How do we get sufficient parts for our service commitments?
  • And, in case we have a shortage, how do we prioritize parts availability?

Alternative sourcing

Everything that comes out of an asset after a service intervention represents a residual value. That value increases when your normal parts supply gets disrupted.

In my career, I’ve experienced that those reverse materials tend to disappear in a ‘grey circuit’ when not facilitating my technicians with an easy and guided admin for proper reverse routing and handling.

What I formerly saw as a hassle to manage, now becomes a welcome additional source of supply. Apart from solving the sheer availability of parts, the lower cost of refurbished parts allows me to offer differentiated pricing when using parts. I can now choose from new, equal-to-new, certified-spare-part, and used-class. This provides me with both a commercial advantage as well as a cost reduction. I win on multiple axes.

Spread the wealth

Even with an additional source of supply through reverse channels, I still had situations where the demand for parts was larger than the supply. My challenge is how do I spread the wealth of available material over all my demanding customers?

My most extreme situation where supply and demand were out of sync, was when I faced a quality-related recall. Overnight, all existing asset owners would demand a retrofit while my supply chain was restocking on the new revision level. I felt a need to prioritize both internal business objectives and customer entitlements.

Typical supply chain solutions allowed me to deploy first-come-first-serve. Advanced service execution systems enabled me to prioritize based on Account and Service Contract attributes. For example, platinum customers first, or contracts up for renewal in the next 6 months first. Contingent to my business objectives I could spread the wealth and manage the risks of scarcity.

Inconvenience alleviated

Supply chain disruptions and mismatches between supply and demand for spares will continue to cause inconveniences. With modern-day tools, we can alleviate the pain and remove the arbitrariness of scarcity.

It’s a bit like waiting in the queue at a call center. We don’t like waiting, but at least we have visibility on the queue. And if that is too long, we can upgrade our service level to get the benefits of a priority queue.

Learn about ServiceMax’s solutions for spare parts, returns and depot repair management:

Continue reading about spare parts planning and supply chain disruption:

This article is published on Field Service Digital.

Rental in Transition

Last week I went to Riga to participate in the annual convention of the European Rental Association. With the theme ‘Rental in Transition’ the convention rightfully worded the pivotal junction in time. Fuelled by the European Green Deal we are poised to rebuild our economy towards net zero emmisions. This means construction will boom requiring lots of construction equipment. The big challenge for OEM, dealer, rental and construction companies will be to manage the installed base of construction equipment from a carbon footprint and emmisions perspective.

Collective bargaining

When the representative of the EU, the consultant from the Boston Consulting Group and the chairman of the European Construction Industry Federation talked about the need and drivers for transition, I had this nagging question. Suppose I own a construction equipment fleet of 1b$, the majority still being internal combustion engine (ICE) based, how do I monetise that investment if the awarding of new construction jobs is based on lower carbon footprint and emission levels?

This is big. This is a challenge of major proportions. Though the delegates subscribed to the mid-term sustainability and transformation goals, for the short-term there’s that ominous questionmark of the how-to. The impact and magnititude of the sustainability transition shows how OEM, dealer, rental, construction companies and legislators are intertwined. This requires a serious dose of collective bargaining.

Preparing for the transition

Regardless of how the transition is going to pan out, for all players in the value chain it is imperative to prepare for the transition. It will become increasingly important to understand the usage profile of construction equipment versus generic equipment attributes.

Let me explain with an example in the car rental industry. When you rent a car it typically comes with a mileage allotment per day. If you drive more, you pay more. If you drive less you still pay the daily rate. You could also split the rental model in an ‘availability’ and ‘usage’ component. Especially if the usage component drives carbon and emissions output, splitting the rental model can motivate the user for a more sustainable use.

This simple example sits at the core of asset-centric business models. It’s not about owning of having an asset, it’s about using it. See here the incentive to digitally transform your business and get access to equipment usage information. Bye the way, if you are catering to the larger construction companies, you will know that providing the usage data of construction equipment is a critical element of the rental service.

Carbon offsetting

Most of the delegates flew to Riga. Upon buying their airline ticket each had a possibility to purchase the carbon-offsetting option. How many did buy that option? Today the majority of the rental companies offer a similar carbon-offsetting option for rental equipment. How often is that option selected? A brief survey amonst the delegates revealed the non-scientific value of ±5%. Rental today is a very price sensitive industry.

When I look at the construction deadlock in my own country, the Netherlands, I see that each new project must submit a carbon and emissions overview before even getting a building permit. We heard the EU representative make remarks along similar lines. “We will use carrot and stick”. And we know of sustainability-forefront-cities only awarding projects to eco-frontrunners.

Does this mean that we can only use electric or hydrogen based equipment for future construction projects? Contemplating on the sheer size of the sustainability challenge, the answer will be ‘no’. There simply isn’t enough construction equipment to get all the work done. But if you want to continue using ICE equipment, you need to get smart at carbon-offsetting options. At the conference we heard that a CO2 calculator is a good start, but we need to make it easier to use and equipment usage based.

Beyond Equipment

For the mid and longer term we have an adject challenge when replacing ICE equipment with electric and hydrogen based alternatives. For ICE equipment we can build on the existing infrastructure of fosile fuels. And for remote locations we can very easy offer a fuel management option. 

If we want to deploy electric and hydrogen based equipment, it often means we have to supply the complete EV or hydrogen powertrain as well. This implies that the rental paradigm will change from equipment rental to complete solutions rental. From an asset management and equipment availability perspective that will mean that the complexity will increase. This will feed the argument for accelerated digital transformation.

In completely different acumen we could label this as ‘servitisation’. When the contractor needs to excavate 100 tonnes of rock, he’ll need an excavator, dumpster truck and complete power train. As food for thought for rental, would it be too far off to start selling electricity/ hydrogen as well?

Beyond Riga

It was great to be in Riga. To hear so many people in the industry. The challenge is big. Yes, there are some threats. Yes, there is a level of denial and green-washing too. On the other hand, the challenge provides a great number of opportunities too. Those who embrace those challenges and embark on their digital transformation journey, those will have the upper hand in a rental market that is in transition.

This article is published on Field Service Digital.

Previous blog on rental.

Maximising Asset Availability for Rental Equipment

Four years ago we moved to the country side and bought an old farmhouse on a large plot of land. Having big construction and landscaping plans we regularly rented all kind of equipment to get the job done. The journey I experienced was tough for the companies that rent out equipment and for my DIY-projects progress. I wish some of these rental companies had state-of-the-art service execution systems, such they could drive both a better customer experience and value delivery.

Job and Equipment planning is tough

The most important thing I’ve learnt in those four years of home improvement is that a piece of rental equipment is ‘just’ a small piece of the planning puzzle. As an example, for my landscaping an element of the work was the relocation of a lot of dirt. For this I needed a (mini) excavator. The availability of the excavator was intricately entangled with ten or more other planning items. You can imagine my surprise/ frustration when the excavator wasn’t available on its due date … and the alternative had only half the capacity.

This is one of many examples I accumulated over four years. As a result I’ve become proficient in reverse engineering the processes of the rental agencies. It’s tough for rental agencies too. If only they had better visibility and planning tools. Speaking of the devil, I happen to work for a company that provides those tools and has implemented them in both business-to-business and business-to-consumer contexts.

The happy path

A rental fleet represents a significant investment so it may sound obvious to know where all that equipment is, and in what state. When you visit a rental yard or a construction site it becomes clear that knowing what-is-where is not that easy. If my personal experiences are representative for equipment visibilty, then WYSIWYG is a rather common implementation.

WYSIWYG works fine when the rental process follows the happy path. Meaning: actual pickup and return date are as planned/ booked; equipment doesn’t break and/or require servicing; no conflicts between availability and demand for equipment.

Going back to my landscaping job and the excavator. With half the capacity, my rental period mathematically doubled. With half the capacity, interlinked activities got pushed out as well causing additional delays. In the end my rental period tripled. Because ‘my’ excavator originally was booked by another customer, the rental agency phoned me in the third week to expedite its return. I was not happy, and certainly I did not pay anymore than the original contracted amount.

Does this sound familiar? Can you imagine how much it costs for a rental agency to mitigate the not-so-happy-path? Cost in headcount and lost revenue generation?

Reducing Turn-Around-Time?

Knowing that a piece of rental equipment is only making money when it is rented out, a key driver is to reduce the so-called turn-around-time (TAT). The time it takes to clean, inspect and service an equipment after its return, making it available for the next customer.

Suppose you have a rental fleet valued at 1b$, then your daily cost for interest and depreciation are roughly half a million $ per day (based on a annuity scheme at 4% interest and five year term). Thus if you can turn TAT-days into rental-days, cost-days become revenue-days. Suppose each piece of equipment has four rental periods per year, and you reduce your TAT by one day, you save 2m$ in cost. Add your sales margin and we’re talking serious numbers when renting out equipment back-to-back.

Defining servicing priorities

This brings us to the most challenging issue in the rental business. Instead of reducing the TAT for every equipment upon return using FiFo, you want to prioritise those units that have an adjacent rental period. By applying prioritisation rules, you can better plan the capacity of the rental return and servicing functions as well as making sure that the most revenue generating units as turned around first.

An example of the non-priortised 

We’ve seen examples where excavators, dumpster trucks and cranes not having an adjacent renter are ‘left’ at the customer site post rental period to save yard space. To ‘free-up’ capacity for the turn-around team in favour of ‘hot rentals’.

Managing the lifecycle of the equipment?

Rental equipment can have a rough life. Let me be honest. I sweated ‘my’ excavator to an extent I would not have done if I owned the excavator. In setting their rates, rental companies take these use cases into account. After each rental period there is a decision to be made: do we maintain the existing equipment or do we replace it?

The math behind the decision is simple: is the earning capacity of the equipment more or less than the cost to sustain it? To make the equation come to live, you need both historical data and forward looking data.

Keeping a record of historical data is pretty much possible in any business tool. For the forward looking piece you’ll need a tool that supports asset centric use cases for your assets.

  • Plotting the future preventive maintenance activities
  • Plotting the future calibration and certification activities
  • Aligning future service interventions such they don’t break or clash with rental periods
  • Create reporting that depicts plan versus actual versus outlook on equipment level

In the past four years I’ve learnt a lot about the rental business. Though a rental fleet is a significant asset on the balance sheet, in rental operations we still see a lot of appointment centric and reactive business practices. Modern day tools allow rental companies to apply asset centric business practices. Becoming proactive and getting a better return on the asset investment.

This article is published on Field Service Digital.

Why you should put service campaigns at the heart of your go-to-market

It’s common sense that owners of products, equipment and assets want a maximum of uptime at minimal operational cost. But how much emphasis does this get in the procurement cycle? For many buyers, it is difficult to define the service requirements over a multi year lifecycle. At the same time, buyers do have implicit expectations regarding lifecycle support, often derived from brand perceptions. This is a nice mix for OEM’s to strategize on.

The bulk of lifecycle cost is in operating the asset

To create an asset lifecycle strategy we will have to look at it from cradle to grave, including both the OEM and the asset owner’s perspective. In the following picture you can see the cost elements that go into each phase.

Lifecycle of assets and costs © ServiceMax

What you can see in the picture is that the cost of operating and maintaining the asset is typically a multiple of the cost of acquiring the asset. In the image from Accenture below, the ratio between product expenditure (capex) and the service expenditures (opex) comes to life. For example, if you had purchased a piece of industrial equipment for $1m, you would spend an additional $7.3m over its lifecycle to keep it running.

Initial product purchase relative to total product lifecycle cost © ServiceMax

Nominal output of the asset

Let’s go back one step. Why does somebody buy an asset? Not for the pleasure of owning it, but to use it. In using it, the asset produces a nominal output/outcome, and that generates value for the asset owner. To maintain the nominal output while wear-and-tear is degrading the asset, a mitigating lifecycle strategy needs to be put in place to secure the value potential of the asset. The following picture shows a typical asset lifecycle.

Typical asset lifecycle © ServiceMax

In this picture you’ll see service interventions like preventive maintenance and break-fix that serve the purpose of uptime. An intervention like an engineering change serves the purpose of prolonging the lifecycle of the asset as well as potentially boosting the original nominal output.

  • Extending lifecycle: mid-life upgrade, retrofit or overhaul.
  • Expanding output: booster-packs, product or software upgrades.

Product engineering beyond Point-of-Sale

Both extending the lifecycle and expanding the nominal output of an asset can be plotted against the continuous process of product engineering. Once a product hits the street, engineering receives feedback on its use through quality, warranty and maintenance channels.

Acting on asset feedback, engineering can design newer revisions of that product as well as define upgrade and booster offerings for the existing installed base.

For some OEM’s the asset feedback loop is an integral part of their Go-to-Market. Imagine you operate in an very competitive and tech savvy market. Timing is essential in building market share. At ServiceMax, we’ve come across OEM’s that go GA with a product when engineering is at 80%. They use the service organization to ‘bestow’ the customer with goodness and attention to make up for the missing 20%. In doing so, the service organization retrieves relevant intelligence to complete the engineering process. As part of the deal, the customer gets the benefit of both the latest technology as well as engineering changes post-point-of-sale. A win-win for both OEM and asset owner.

Using the product lifecyle as a means to customer intimacy

Whether you launch your product at 80% engineering completeness or at 100%, most OEM’s will continue to engineer their product beyond GA. The question is, how would you like to make those product improvements and engineering changes accessible to your existing installed base. In other words, have you setup a process to manage asset lifecycle service campaigns?

Service campaigns can stem from two different emotions. A negative and a positive one. In the end, when you manage your campaigns well, you’ll achieve higher levels of customer intimacy.

  • Negative emotions: These are quality and complaint driven engineering changes. A customer expects a certain quality and nominal output level, but is not getting it. The customer expects the supplier to fix it as quick as possible at no extra cost. Though a complaint and quality issue may start as a negative emotion, an OEM’s capability to act on it determines if the emotion remains negative or turns positive. In addition, service campaign capabilities will deliver efficiency and compliance benefits to the OEM.
  • Positive emotions: These are engineering changes that will enhance the capabilities of the asset. As such, you go above and beyond the nominal output specifications promised at point-of-sale. In general customers will perceive this as a positive, adding credibility to the OEM’s leadership and brand value. With service campaigns an OEM can reinforce that positive emotion as well as monetize it.

Service campaigns drive pro-active service

If customers buy assets to use them, OEM’s are very well positioned to facilitate the usage of those assets throughout their lifecycle. The OEM designed the product. The OEM has all the expert knowledge of how and why the product works. Now, if the OEM gets feedback on how each individual asset performs in the field, the OEM is sitting on a gold mine of data, ready to be servitized and monetized. The vehicle to deliver those services to the installed base is called – service campaigns.

This article is published on Diginomica.

How to Use Service Marketing to Grow Service Revenue

Over the last five to ten years, a growing number of Chief Service Officers (CSOs) have been assigned a service revenue growth target—a trend recently confirmed through research by Noventum, which found that more than 85% of product manufacturers have set a growth target for their service function. As this trend gains steam, we think it’s worth examining how CSOs can achieve service revenue growth and what they can learn from the sales side.

If you ask a salesperson to grow revenue, they will ask for two prerequisites:

  • More and newer products with more features at a better price point
  • A marketing budget to target the addressable market

What does a CSO ask for when receiving and accepting a service revenue growth target? For many CSO’s, growing service revenue and using service marketing is unchartered territory.

What’s your marketing budget?

Up to 2012, I managed my service operations at Bosch as a cost center. At that time service was the single largest margin contributor to the company. In 2012, I received service revenue growth objectives. Simultaneously my role transitioned from the service domain to the sales domain. In my first conversation with the chief revenue officer, I was asked: “What marketing budget do you need?”

Having run service operations for 25 years, my automatic response was to first focus on achieving excellence for the existing service delivery capabilities. After a crash course in sales and marketing, I revised my strategy. Sell first. Secure the revenue. Use the revenue to finance the maturing of your delivery capabilities.

The result: a quadrupling of service revenue in five years. How? By focusing on two items:

  1. Using the voice of the customer to develop a services portfolio
  2. Setting up service marketing for the installed base

Developing a services portfolio

Back in 2012, I was so focused on service delivery, it never crossed my mind to challenge my services portfolio. My sales colleagues explained to me that a portfolio with sufficient choice is the basis for revenue generation. We then set on a course to create a services portfolio with selectable features and differing price points. Our goal was to create an “a la carte” menu card.

The true test was to come. Would our customers buy the items from our menu card? This is where we realized our need for a true marketing function. A function to help us frame the value messaging and to reach out to the target audience.

Setting up service marketing

First, we looked at the value promise our company made to its customers. Is that value promise pertaining to owning the product and/or is it about using the product throughout its lifecycle? How does our menu card of lifecycle services fit in? And how do we facilitate product owners in making the right service lifecycle choices?

In setting up a marketing function for service, we used our sales colleagues as reference. In the world of sales, key metrics are Total Addressable Market (TAM) and Market Share. Marketing uses these two parameters to spearhead campaigns. In the world of service, these two metrics can be substituted by Installed Base penetration and Attach Rates.

Total addressable market

Suppose you have installed base visibility of 100% and all those units have an attached service contract. Suppose all those contracts are of the type gold-service. The sum of that equation is your maximum achievable service revenue. You could label this as your service-TAM. If your organization also services units of competing brands, the service-TAM will be bigger.

Market share

Your current actual service revenue is the compound result of two factors – your ability to drive installed base visibility and attach rates, in combination with the attractiveness of your services portfolio.

The gap

As mentioned in an earlier blog Mind the Gap, the delta between your service-TAM and your actual market share is your revenue gap. This gap encompasses your target audience for service marketing. The larger the gap, the bigger your compelling reason to review your services portfolio and to establish a service marketing function.

Targeting your audience

Service marketing has one big advantage over sales marketing: with a field service management system focused on asset-centric business models, marketing will have the perfect data set to drive targeted campaigns:

  • Knowing where your installed base is
  • Knowing the state of the asset and how the asset is being used
  • Having a record of the maintenance history
  • Knowing what engineering change orders and modernizations have been implemented
  • Visibility to the current service contract and entitlements

As one of our customers told us:

“We operated a model of sell and forget. Now we sell and service. We have invested in installed base visibility, attach rates, our services portfolio and service marketing. We are now on a deliberate and conscious path of service revenue growth.”

Setting a budget

Knowing what I know now, I would respond differently to my former chief revenue officer. I would request a service marketing budget to revisit my services portfolio and to initiate targeted marketing on my revenue gap.

I would not hesitate to commit to service revenue growth targets, knowing the service delivery organization had an asset-centric field service management system.

This article is published in ServiceMax Field Service Digital on August 25th, 2021

Managing your Quality and Engineering Changes

February 2021, breaking news, your engineering team issues a mandatory engineering change to all product models ABC built between 2011 – 2013. “The gearbox needs a retrofit to avoid potential injury and claims”.

Change the verbatim, the dates or the technical details. I guess you’ll recognise the scenario. Whether the origin of the change is quality, compliance, engineering maturity or commercially driven, managing engineering changes is a big deal. A big deal because you don’t want claims. You don’t want your brand image tarnished. You don’t want cost overruns. It’s a big deal because you want to convert a negative into a positive.

Engineering changes extend into the operational life cycle of a product

I once believed every product was 100% engineered before it found its way onto the markets. Having run service organisations for more than 25 years I’ve reduced my confidence in this percentage year over year. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t mean to say that is a bad thing, but I do want to emphasise that acknowledging that anything less than 100% puts a burden on the service organisation to build mitigating processes.

I’ve seen organisations introduce 80% engineered products by business model design, as they need the usage feedback to finalise the engineering. Other organisations aim at a near 100% engineered product, only to discover their products are used in unforeseen contexts leading to post-GA modifications. And in the digital age I see more and more organisations enhancing product capabilities of physical products by ‘selling’ software upgrade options.

Where is my Installed Base?

All variants share a common premise: you need to have installed base visibility as well as an accurate as-maintained BoM to be able to manage your engineering changes effectively.

To illustrate this, I’ll give an example on the other end of the spectrum. If you don’t know where the affected products are, and you have a compliance obligation to reach out to the product/ asset owners, you can only go public … and that is not good for your brand image … as many car manufacturers and food companies will confirm.

In our Global Customer Transformation (GCT) practice we often see a hybrid. Some units sold have an associated warranty and/ or service contract, other units are not visible because they are sold via an indirect channel and/or the owner does not want to be visible. What engineering change managers need is a ‘workbench’ to create a near-complete installed base from multiple data sources.

Now we have a near-complete installed base, we can filter on model ABC with a commissioning date between 2011 – 2013. 

Spread the Wealth

A common characteristic of engineering changes is that they tend to come at an inconvenient time, on top of the existing workload. What potentially complicates things is the combination of a) the availability of replacement parts and b) the customer expectation to be first in line.

Let me give you an illustration that reveals my age. In 1989 Intel launched the 80486 processor. High-end customers upped the specs of their PC’s with the 80487 co-processor. Then a researcher detected a mathematical flaw in the co-processor. Immediately people wanted a replacement. The supply chain was stocked with the flawed 80487 revision 1, whilst Intel had to ramp the production and shipments of revision 2. In analogy to Covid-19 vaccinations you can imagine this became a puzzle of priorities and constant shifting plans.

In our GCT practice we talk to Engineering Change Managers. They receive so called product bulletins on a regular basis. And each time they need to make decisions on when to launch an engineering change campaign while weighing brand image, quality and cost. And once they have launched a campaign, they want to know the progress. But the most asked ‘feature’ by Engineering Change Managers is the ability to adapt the priorities in a campaign based on progress, the amount of ‘wealth’, the voice of the customer and the impact on existing SLA & Contract commitments. Regarding the latter, I’ll dedicate my next blog on Engineering Change prioritisation strategies. 

Digital EC’s and Retrofit Kits as Upsell and Lock-in instrument

I’d like to change the ‘energy level’ of the conversation. Engineering changes are not always negative from a quality, financial or brand image perspective.

There is a limit to the number of mechanical and electrical changes you can make to a product post commissioning using Retrofit Kits, but more modern products have an ever-growing digital component. Digital engineering maturity continues post commissioning.Do you own a Sonos sound system, a Tesla, a digital press? The physical product you bought remains the same, while over-the-air digital EC’s deliver a steady stream of new features and enhancements. Whether your organisation uses this EC-stream for lock-in purposes or upsell revenue, at the core you need an asset centric infrastructure with comprehensive engineering change capabilities.

This article is published in ServiceMax Field Service Digital on March 2nd, 2021

How to Maintain and Protect Your Brand as an OEM

You make great products. You have a strong brand. But how do you maintain those products and protect your brand beyond the point of sale? What do you do when customers demand more through CX or regulators demand more through compliance or channels partners struggle to deliver consistent service? The good news is modern field service management systems provide you with the tools to manage and overcome these challenges.

Trending in 2021

At the close of each year, a lot of people ask me to make some predictions for the new year. Honestly, with some extreme disruptions in 2020, it is hard to single out a theme for 2021. Though I do see a consistent trend over the last decade. A trend that will very much drive the OEM transformation agenda: how do we extend our value proposition beyond the revenue of the product sales? Margin contribution on product sales is dwindling. Thus, it is logical that your CFO is eying service margins and tasking you with service revenue growth. So, let’s focus on two 2021 topics to achieve those goals.

  1. Improve your installed base visibility across all your sales channels
  2. Support your product throughout its life cycle

And by focussing on these two, you’ll get a lot of adjacent benefits too.

Step 1: Invest in Installed Base Visibility and Effective Channel Partners

To exert a maximum level of control over the value an OEM can provide to its customers, an OEM may have the ambition to own each step of the value chain. The commercial reality is that a network of partners and competitors is involved in the value creation. This may result in a battle over the ownership of the customer relationship. Especially when we consider the underlying paradigm: the one who owns the relationship owns the levers to CX and sustainable revenue.

The key enabler to value creation is your Installed Base Visibility. It is pretty straight forward. If you want to create value from the products you sell, you need to know where they are and how they are being used. Without visibility, your service delivery will be in the blind. Without a relationship, your revenue streams will be unpredictable.

We see more and more OEMs investing in installed base visibility. This starts with shifting from margin contribution through product sales to margin contribution through using the product.  The increased margin contribution pays for the investment and buy-in from the channel partners.

Are you curious about what installed base visibility brings to the bottom line? See what Schneider Electric was able to achieve here.

Step 2: Support Your Product Throughout Its Life Cycle

Who knows your product best? You, the OEM. You designed it and built it, so it seems you are best qualified to support its use during its life cycle. Hence the previous paragraph, you need to know where your installed base is and in what condition.

For each product, we know that the true test comes when it is used by real customers. No matter how well designed and built it is, actual customers seem to use products in more different ways than you have anticipated. Whether the feedback is coming to you via the quality department, service interactions, or through an autonomous engineering department, your products do get revisions and engineering changes.

Some of these changes are for liability and compliance. Others may enhance the function of the product, potentially driving more value. Thus, you have multiple reasons to reach out to your installed base. And when you do so, you want to track what portion of that base you have reached.

Two to Tango

The combination of installed base visibility and product life cycle support form an ideal tango to strengthen your brand. Though the commercial reality of your channel strategy may impact your ability to reach out to your installed base, asset-centric field service management tools make it much easier to visualize and manage your assets. Extending those tools to your channel partners will make it easier to share and grow the value creation for your customers.

Whether you decide to take tango lessons in 2021 or not, at least put some thought into the beauty and joy of the dance. I promise you; your customers will like it.

This article is published in ServiceMax Field Service Digital on December 17th, 2020