Module 6 – Service infusions in Heavy Commercial Vehicle Industry

 The company I work in is a traditional production company and manufacturer of heavy commercial vehicles and historically the industry has been seen as classic “goods industry”.

The industry as such are changing though. Customers that historically only bought a vehicle, is now demanding more and more services packages and service solutions connected to their actual vehicle purchase. This has driven the industry towards that companies move from only delivering Product value -  to adding Service value - and further against more “Solutions” (seamless system). In our company we actually say that we aren´t only delivering a vehicle – we offer a transport solution.

When listening to Julia Jonasson from Volvo, I think they have managed to describe where they are on their journey against being a full scale transport provider in a very good way in the “Service Journey” picture. If I should rate our company, I would say that we, just as Volvo, somewhere between “Maintenance services” and “Professional services”.  

 

 

 

To do this journey,  going from a traditional product oriented company to a service oriented company, leads to some challenges.

One thing I think can be a challenge in our company is when we try to drive a development that is a service related issue instead of a “hardcore” product related issue. I think it can be quite tricky to get engineers and technicians in our company to understand and strive for investments connected to this service development, this is probably due to that they are used to hardcore product questions which can be quite measureable, service investments can be harder to measure… This is also something Nina Löfberg talks about in her video.

Another challenge is, when introducing new services, there might be a resistance from the sales force. It´s always convenient to sell what you have always sold, and maybe they see it tricky and difficult to start selling this new service and therefore don´t promote the service that much. It´s therefore really important that we as a company make sure that we “roll out” these new services in a good way = educate the sales persons in a good way to make them feel safe and secure with selling the new service.  

It could also be that they don´t even see the benefit for the customer since they are product oriented. This means service sales can be missed if developed by a service oriented employee and then taken over by a product oriented employee.

A fundamental thought according to Nina Löfberg is to change the mindset of the employees from product orientation to service orientation! I agree on that. J