Routes for your Connected Services journey

Undertaking a Connected Services journey may take a while. Therefore, we recommend plotting and planning a route.

To do this, you should first identify the business initiatives your company has decided to focus on.

Business initiatives that can generate and shape a Connected Services journey are:

• Designing and offering digital services

• Making the supply of spare parts and consumables smarter

• Making after-sales services connected and smarter

• Evolving along advanced services with confidence, thanks to data

Then you can divide each initiative into smaller elements, enabling you to reach intermediate milestones.

At this point you can plot a route that moves forward along all the initiatives, one element at a time.

To do this, you can use the map of elements that make up a connected services offering.

Let's take an example.

Let’s assume that your company has decided to undertake the “Digital Services” and “Smart After-sales” business initiatives.

0️⃣ The starting point is step 0, that is, having connected products.

1️⃣ The next step is typically designing and offering “Base Digital Services”, that is giving basic digital capabilities for free in exchange of asking the customer to connect the product to the internet.

5️⃣ You are now ready to implement the element “Reactive connected after-sales “, which is to make your current after-sales services ‘connected’ while keeping them reactive.

2️⃣ At this point you could add “Value-added Digital Services” to your offering, that is selling to end customers digital capabilities that positively impact their business, helping them reaching the performance they expect from the product.

6️⃣ Finally you can implement the last element of a Smart After-sales initiative, “Proactive smart after-sales”, which is, instead of reacting to failures, ensuring that failures do not occur, through smart, data-driven maintenance plans.

Mastering element 6 means you are confident about your ability to operate proactively and to enable your customers to achieve performance levels they expect. This is an excellent starting point to absorb a further degree of risk and launch the “Connected Advanced Services” business initiative, be it 7️⃣ providing outcome-based contracts or 8️⃣ an equipment-as-a-Service offering.

In case your company also supply spare parts and/or consumables, at any moment after element 1 you might consider leveraging connected products to 3️⃣ streamline or 4️⃣ automate their supply.