A Cookbook for Creating, Providing, and Supervising 21st-Century Manufacturing Services

We have all worked in industrial service business or researched servitization for over

20 years and we wrote this book to help managers to make the move into services.

Services are based on intangibles like relationships and trust, and product businesses

are based on physical objects with clearly defined requirements. Product businesses

are, on the whole, separated from the customer, while a service is often delivered

with the customer. This means that senior management deciding the strategic

objective is to "move into services" can lead to failure unless there is guidance for

the management team, which is where this book comes in as it is designed to help

middle management take actions to support the servitization strategy. We recognized

that there are many good strategy books on why service can be good for a productfocused

business, but few provide actionable concrete examples of how, say a

service shop manager, can improve their performance.

The final reason for the book came from the fact that many service leaders come

from the shop-floor workforce. Now, while this has many advantages, such as the

service leaders really understanding the pains of their customers, it can mean that the

leaders view them more as partners or friends than traditional customers. Service

leaders often need more support with the "change management" aspects of

transitioning the business to focus on services, as there can be a tendency for

operational action to overtake strategic thinking. This book is constructed of three

chapters.