Building the customer business case for smart services: Starting with Why In this series of posts, I address service product management topics around building smart services - more specifically remote monitoring/predictive maintenance/prescriptive maintenance services for industrial machinery OEMs. Product Managers, in my mind, are mini-CEO’s of such offers and are...
The Manifesto for a New Normal
"Just spread your wings Let loose and fly with me Come on let's Leave This World Behind" - Kreator: Leave this world behind It was exactly a year ago that I returned from BrauBeviale, an international trade fair for the beverages and brewing industry and realised that I had lost...
Industry 4.0: Customer portals vs. Customer’s portal
"I come not to praise customer portals but to bury them". [Repurposed from Mark Antony's speech in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar] In this post, I hope to trigger a debate within the Industry 4.0 community on the need for so called Customer Portals that are proliferating among the industrial machinery...
Accessing the long-tail with the right incentives
Apologies for the delay in getting this piece out. Summer weather and the birth of a baby make focusing on writing articles a lot harder. In my last article I promised to discuss incentives that OEMs can deploy to encourage the end users of their machines to contact them to...
The long-tail is where the next billion in service revenue is (Part 2)
In my last post, I covered the stakes in expanding the coverage of after-sales services to a wider customer base. Here is a Venn diagram that explains the current situation for the best run services businesses in the industrial machinery sector. Install-base services coverage Whom did we sell our machines...
The long-tail is where the next billion in service revenue is (Part 1)
For the last couple of decades, as service revenue grew in importance, industrial machinery OEMs rightfully focused on their large named accounts. Adhering to the 80-20 principle in increasing penetration of strategic accounts has been hugely successful but as large customers start to consolidate purchasing, not only...
Why digital plant projects fail (and what to do to succeed)
In a different life, I worked as the PMO for a global SAP deployment program at a large industrial company. As we work with customers of MachIQ Seva, who are approaching plant operators with digital services offers that they deliver on our Asset Performance Management software, I have a sense of...
Field Service is dead (Part 2): Digitalising field services
In my earlier article, "Field Services Is Dead. Long Live (Digital) Field Services", I made a case for why machinery companies must continue down the digital transformation path, away from the traditional field services execution model. In this follow-up article, I explore the options available for companies that choose to...
Field Services is dead. Long live (digital) field services
Traditional field service activities experienced an accelerated shift to digital delivery models during the Covid-19 lockdowns. As travel reopens slowly, will machinery companies keep the momentum for their digital transformation or revert to business as usual? Roy Chikballapur makes a case for machinery companies to keep the pace in deploying...
Offering the best of Just-in-time and Just-in-case with spare parts eCommerce
Digital technologies can enable machinery companies to execute more efficient spare parts businesses.