Initial Situation

Central challenges for providers of industrial services

To meet and sustain the presently growing requirements of the competitive environment in industrial services, companies are challenged to:

• In order to keep up with competition, the offered services have to possess a clearly perceivable added value for the customers. Putting this into practice proves to be tough challenge against the background of rising cost pressure due to increasing competition
• Furthermore industrial service providers face the risk that their service offering becomes interchangeable with competitors’ offerings leading to a differentiation only by price.
• Not least of all an increasing internationalisation exacerbates the competitive environment.

On the other hand industrial service providers have to face new customer requirements:

• Besides a high service quality, service companies are expected to offer a full risk assumption, flexible emergency service and distinctive reflexes towards customer requests.
• Simultaneously, the demand for customised services causes increasing efforts in synchronisation and insecurity, whereas planning dependability and transparency of service delivery decrease.

This situation confronts industrial service providers with the following tasks

• Strict alignment of the service portfolio to the added value for the customer
• Increase in productivity of service provision
• Elimination of wastes