Industrial Manufacturers Have Embraced Service. What Comes Next?

By Tom Paquin, Contributor, Future of Field Service

Manufacturing firms across a variety of disciplines have been looking for ways to implement more service-oriented solutions into traditional manufacturing processes. This true for organizations that work with capital and industrial equipment as much as it is for any other manufacturer, but for industrial manufacturers, there are a variety of unique challenges that must be considered.

Industrial assets—especially those that will become part of a broader manufacturing workflow—exist in a more mature service market than some of their manufacturing peers. As tools that are largely leveraged in business environments, the need to provide thorough service is much more than a courtesy. Broken assets means money out of the pockets of your customers, so offering detailed service plans, especially if you can guarantee outcomes around things like uptime and output, are the path forward. These new outcomes-based business models will ultimately define the future of field service for industrial manufacturers, and many businesses are already embracing outcomes today.

The actual requirements and technical specifications necessary to embrace outcomes-based service will invariably differ from use case to use case, but the bottom line is that to offer contracts around guaranteed performance, manufacturers need to have the internal capabilities to measure and validate performance among often complex systems. Bridging that gap requires some mechanical and operational forethought, as well as a robust and full-featured service management utility that is capable of managing extensive and complex assets, processes, and workflows. Here are some considerations for how to do this correctly: