Good service is good business

Service excellence today means staying focused on customers’ needs. At Roland Berger, this is something we’ve taken to heart in a very special way—we were pioneers in the shift towards seeing services as a separate business area, and we’ve had the pleasure of assisting a multitude of companies succeed in this competitive environment by making services their USP. That’s why we’ve made service the focus of this edition of COO Insights, our exclusive publication that targets the issues that matter to COOs the most.

If there is any doubt as to services’ value, let’s take a quick look to Germany. In the country’s mechanical and plant engineering sector, 80% of revenue is generated by the sale of new equipment and 20% by services—but that 20% accounts for 60% of profits. This illuminating fact, and many more, can be found in this edition’s first feature article, Service excellence: It can be done, which profiles four service archetypes as well as six success factors in making industrial services into profitable business. We also dig into the future of Industry 4.0 in an exclusive interview with Trumpf Executive Vice President Mathias Kammüller and Services Chief Till Küppers, who tell us how services have the potential to one day account for half of business.

Digital service transformation

Alongside these feature stories, we present a number of smaller articles that hone in on different issues and points of interest ranging from the secret lives of manufacturing services to tailoring for local markets and the four levers of digital service transformation that will be critical in tomorrow’s performance. We also take an in-depth look at data and explain why international services are vital if companies are to survive in global competition. At the center of this edition is one recurring, essential theme: the question is no longer whether companies sell products or services, but what services they provide when they take their products to market.