Typical examples in the industrial product segment include:
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Preventive maintenance
Certain components of a product have a limited service life and can be replaced preventively to avoid problems and downtime.
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Upgrade packages
An aging product can often be extended so that it stays up to date for years to come. Upgrades can also include additional or better components that improve the product as a whole.
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Spare parts
These are mostly mechanical components that wear over the course of their service life. When this is known, customers can stock compatible spare parts in advance or after the fact and replace them as needed.
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Consulting
Customers can benefit greatly from additional consulting, whether it's competitive product advice or a comprehensive solution for their business.
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Service contracts
Service contracts are a good way to give a company's customers a certain sense of security. Broadly speaking, such contracts describe what support the customer can expect during regular operations or in the event of a failure. This list is far from complete, but it gives a brief overview of common services that a company can and should offer its customers.
The foundations of a service offering
A service is preceded by corresponding input factors that form the basis of the offering. These input factors are usually provided as data from other systems.
From these inputs, the corresponding offers can then be created for specific products. As a rule, offers are generated through a static and/or rule-based evaluation of the input parameters. A system for generating offers usually includes the definition of the possible offer types as well as the ability to create concrete offers for a company's various products. To generate offers, the system looks at the complete set of properties of a product as well as how it is used at the customer's site. Based on the predefined properties and rules of an offer, the system then determines the concrete offers that are possible for a product. Such an evaluation can be so granular that it produces concrete offers for a specific customer, a customer group or entirely different groupings.
An example of generating offers
An industrial company manufactures a product line that is used in many other industrial operations. The products in the line are mostly standard products, although certain products are customized for the customer's specific application. The products themselves sell for prices in the five- to six-figure range and therefore represent a fairly high investment.
At first glance, the following service offerings make sense for the product line:
- Preventive maintenance
- Upgrade packages
- Spare parts
- Consulting
- Service contracts
In this example, we'll focus specifically on the first three offer types, whose content relates to technical parts. The following data is essential for generating these offers.
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Parts list (bill of materials)
This basic information makes it possible to generate suitable spare parts or upgrades.
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Technical details of the product
This allows an evaluation based on the technical characteristics of a product. This data is particularly relevant for rule-based evaluations.
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Customer information
Various data about the location, area of application, contract terms or other details can be used to derive appropriate upgrades or extensions.
While product and customer information comes from an installed base application, bills of materials are sourced from the product management tool. By specifying concrete properties of an offer, every single product sold can be reviewed and evaluated in detail. For each parts list, it can also be decided directly which spare parts, upgrades or extensions are suitable for the specific product XY at customer XY.
Offers are generated for each product sold, creating enormous potential for service offerings that can in turn be offered to your own customers.
Key elements of offer generation
It's immediately clear that generating offers involves a certain dynamic, since it addresses the specific makeup of a product. This dynamic is one of the most important characteristics of offer generation: implementing an offer for a specific product changes its makeup, which in turn changes the parts list and results in different available offers.
That's why the timeliness and quality of the maintained data play an extremely important role in generating concrete service offerings. The more you know, the better the yield.
Integration via middleware
Within a company, the data needed to generate service offerings is usually maintained in various systems and must be accessible to the system.
Access to the data is ensured by using what is known as middleware. The middleware serves as the link between the various systems. Data is either retrieved directly by the middleware or transported by the middleware to the corresponding systems.
In our projects, we use the middleware that comes with Paloma, as it meets the necessary requirements for quality, efficiency and flexibility. Paloma also provides the required access speed and filtering options for the data it provides, and it integrates seamlessly into any system environment.
Conclusion
Automatically generating service offerings is a tremendously powerful thing, but it requires a certain level of data quality and system integration.
The cost savings from automation are enormous, since generating such offers is usually not possible at all, or only with very cumbersome manual work.
With the right integration of our Paloma middleware, you always have the data flows between your systems under control. With the additionally available software for rule-based offer generation, all that's left for you to do is ensure the right data quality.
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