Designing Services That Deliver - Service Engineering at Alfa Laval

Sammanfattning: As most manufacturing companies Alfa Laval needs to find new ways to differentiate by shifting the current product focus towards a more service oriented approach. Many manufacturing companies find it difficult to increase service revenues successfully. High investments in extending the service business do not result in the expected higher returns, providing a service paradox. To overcome the paradox and harvest the profits extracted from increasing service investments, companies can establish a clearly defined service development process, set up a service organization, create a service culture and focus on how the service offers add value to the customer. By combining existing engineering know-how with service development expertise, manufacturing companies can develop services that deliver. It is therefore interesting to investigate: what is service engineering and how can it be utilized for manufacturing companies such as Alfa Laval to develop successful services? The aim of this master thesis is to discuss the content of service engineering and describe why it is important and how it can be utilized for manufacturing companies to develop successful services. Designing a service engineering environment will be a prerequisite for manufacturing companies to harvest the increasing returns of service investments. This should be done by anchoring service development as a permanent task in the organization within an existing unit. A central service developer should be appointed, utterly responsible for service development issues. Several local service developers should also be appointed, responsible for local adaptation and adjustments. Manufacturing companies can use ideas from product development models and design its own service development model based on the company’s basic characteristics and type of service offered. We find that it is possible to use service engineering models for high and low contact intense services if used with service development tools such as blueprinting and flowcharting. Designing services that deliver requires a change of mind, a transition from being a product-focused company to a service company. This transition will come by incrementally focus on servicing the installed base, thereby designing services that deliver.