A Connected Services Strategy is an action plan that defines the end goals, intermediate milestones, and activities needed to successfully leverage your connected product data to enrich and optimize your service offerings.
This strategy can be developed into a broader digital servitization journey, which may include other digital technologies.
It is the combination of two areas:
the design and development of your connected services offering
the design and implementation of the application software supporting the deployment of your connected services
Designing and developing your Connected Services offering
A useful tool for planning the development of your Connected Services is the “staircase of Connected Services”.
Defining your strategy means identifying your current position on the staircase and plotting your route to the elements you want to develop.
Basically, a connected services strategy defines what mix of these business initiatives to develop.
Among all the possible routes, there are a few typical ones. These are the connected services business initiatives.
The Connected Services Business Initiatives
We distinguish connected services business initiatives based on:
what you do with data
the business goal
the type of offer toward the customer, what the customer buys
the type of involvement of field service teams to deliver the service
the typical contract model
the person within the organization leading the initiative
the role of the Customer Portal of the DPS system
the role of the Digital Control Room of the DPS system
Digital Services | Smart Spare Parts & Consumables | Connected & Smart After-sales | Connected Advanced Services | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
You harness data in order to … | offer a digital solution to help end customers operating and maintaining their product and thus let them achieve concrete benefits, such as saving time, consumption and operating costs or increasing efficiency, productivity and peace of mind | identify when a spare part or consumable needs to be replaced and automate the ordering and supply process as much as possible | support and empower your service teams, both internal and external, with data, actionable information and workflow supporting capabilities | extract all useful information and manage activities in order to guarantee your customers’ outcomes |
Your business goal is … | strengthen the relationship with your customers, reinforce the sales of connected products and, possibly, generate a new revenue stream | make the supply of spare parts or consumables more robust, increase revenue and make revenue recurring | improve the efficiency and effectiveness of activities performed by your and your partners’ service teams, evolve towards a proactive service and generate new revenue from value-added service contracts | generate and capture more value by delivering outcomes and minimize the risks you absorb |
The customer pays for … | access to data, actionable information and workflow supporting capabilities | spare parts, when needed | repair and maintenance activities | outcomes |
Type of involvement of field service teams | - | - | delivery of technical assistance, repair and maintenance activities | delivery of maintenance activities under a service level agreement |
Typical contract | free or subscription | transaction or subscription | transaction or subscription | subscription |
The initiative is typically led by … | product manager | spare parts sales manager / service manager | service manager | service manager |
Customers use the Connected Customer Portal of the DPS system to … | access data, actionable information, and workflow-supporting capabilities | order spare parts or set up automatic order policies | interact with the service team, and monitor activities performed | interact with the service team, monitor activities and have a transparent and detailed drill-down into outcomes measurement |
Service teams use the Digital Control Room of the DPS system to … | - | - | perform remote diagnostics, troubleshooting, proactive monitoring, smart maintenance planning | perform remote diagnostics, troubleshooting, proactive monitoring, smart maintenance planning and outcomes measurement |
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