How to make and sustain the shift to services? 

More than ever customers, particularly industrial customers, are prepared to contract capabilities and outcomes and engage in longer relationships with providers. Customers buy outcomes that they value – fit their particular needs. Therefore the ability to sell services is becoming increasingly important for organizations in assessing their future competitive strategies to succeed in the market.

The shift to services, selling outcomes and solutions, rather than products, is extremely challenging. It requires new ways of working, communicating, interacting, planning and delivering continuous and progressive value to customers. The shift to services occurs across many business sectors and has implications across all organisational functions.

Digital Twins: Business Innovation and Disruption 

Many industries are paying more attention to Digital Twins (DTW). For instance, the transport, telecommunications, aerospace and other asset heavy industries are looking to implement Digital Twins into their existing services. the majority of research in DTW is focused on driving benefits on driving efficiency and reducing costs from DTW.

This year the shift to service project focuses on the study of “what disruption ‘Digital Twins’ bring to existing business models”. This project was successfully launched with the close collaboration from IBM, CAT, BAE and Thales. 

Outputs

The project has produced outputs including the service strategy model, the critical success factors in the shift to services and other individual tools to assist organisations in the development, management and commercial execution of their services.

The outputs and findings of this study are inspiring interesting discussions among the partners’ service field teams, generating new innovative ideas to test and implement services in practice. The project’s outputs are continually disseminated through presentations of preliminary results to industrial partners during weekly meetings, community of interest meetings, webinars and service field teams meetings.

If you want to know more about the Seven Critical Success Factors in the Shift to service” you could download the Report or listen the Podcast.

The shift to service team has published a paper in the American Journal of Medical Research. The paper is “Making the transition to services in the animal health industry”. This is an important achievement as our research is crossing disciplines and moving to higher international standards.

Updates

The making and sustaining the shift to service research has captured the attention of practitioners and academics. The project has developed better understanding on the service journey experience, the model to drive service strategy, the factors that drive success in the shift to services, the approach to pilot services among others.

In this phase of the project, we interviewed the “Provides” of Digital Twins. IBM and Siemens participated this month in our research. Multiple interviewees from Design to Implementation Departments shared with us their “realities as to how Digital Twins are used and applied to diverse contexts”. We explore how Digital Twins are shaping the future of our industries, in particular the Service Industry. From this exploratory data gathering, we learnt that Digital Twins have different levels and dimensions that are important to understand in the mission of extracting the Best in Class companies. A convergent agreement among the interviewees shows that the Digital Twins have a long and strong trajectory for Future Product-Service Business Models.

Download

Paper -'Exploring the Journey to Services'.

Webinar - Exploring the Journey to Services 

If you want to know more about the Seven Critical Success Factors in the Shift to service” you could download the Report or listen the Podcast.

Making the Shift to Services - Poster from Service Week 2016

Making the Shift to Services - Poster from Service Week 2015

Making and Sustaining the Shift to Services - Poster from Service Week 2014

'Making the Transition to Services in the Animal Health Industry' by Veronica Martinez., V Pouthas and Daniel Smith, in America Journal of Medical Research. (2017) 4 (1) : 34-49

Researchers

Dr. Veronica Martinez
Senior Research Associate