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
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.
Letās assume that your company has decided to undertake the āDigital Servicesā and āSmart After-salesā business initiatives.
0ļøā£ The starting point is step 0, that is, having connected products.
1ļøā£ The next step is typically designing and offering āBase Digital Servicesā, that is giving basic digital capabilities for free in exchange of asking the customer to connect the product to the internet.
5ļøā£ You are now ready to implement the element āReactive connected after-sales ā, which is to make your current after-sales services āconnectedā while keeping them reactive.
2ļøā£ At this point you could add āValue-added Digital Servicesā 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.
6ļøā£ Finally you can implement the last element of a Smart After-sales initiative, āProactive smart after-salesā, 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 āConnected Advanced Servicesā business initiative, be it
In case your company also supply spare parts and/or consumables, at any moment after element 1 you might consider leveraging connected products to