Deploying your Connected Services offering requires planning and tracking.
We suggest here a number of dimensions worth considering.
To have an overview of your overall progress you can list these dimensions on a single page and for each indicate the progress status, like the one below:
Dimensions on which to assess progress
- % of connected product models over your entire product catalog.
- % of connected products over your installed base
- Data richness
- Incoming (from products to DPS): extension and deepness of raw metrics
- Outgoing (from DPS to products): extension and deepness of remote configuration and control
- Data-driven approach in the organization. Assess the spread and level of knowledge about the data-driven approach in the organization: how many internal stakeholders are served by the DPS? what is the level of involvement of each? is it something they cannot live/work without ? (Coverage of internal personas)
- Service
- Sales
- Product R&D
- CEO / Board
(Out of the DPS boundaries, this aspect could be further expanded with an overall company-wide Data Platform)
- Digital services. Assess:
- Channels: web, mobile, APIs
- Base digital services: digital capabilities customers perceive as a digital extension of the product, included in product offering, digital twin, used almost in real time to check conditions, especially alarms, and remote control or configuration
- Value-added digital services: digital capabilities customers perceive as an additional value on top of product, purchased separately
- Coverage of personas on the customer side (→ Personas)
- Coverage of topics, health, productivity, consumption, consumables, spare parts, quality, process (→ Topics)
- Level of help. Assess the level of help the digital service offers your customers on each topic: trom showing only raw data to highlighting situations that require attention to giving precise directions on how to achieve the expected results.
- Digitally-enabled services. Track progress along this route (→ Routes for your Connected Services journey)
- Value chain involvement. How many stakeholders in your value chain (distributors, dealers, resellers, technical assistance centers) are you involving ? How much are they aligned to what you offer? Superimpose a layer on your Connected Services Route and check how much they are involved in each element
The two staircases of services
Frequently, the development of connected services takes place in parallel within a servitization journey.
The Advanced Services Group (one of the most active and advanced research centers on servitization globally) proposes several methods, processes and tools to support servitization. One of these is called the Services Staircase.
We really liked the conciseness and clarity of ASG's staircase and we tried to bring it to our domain: Digital / Connected Services.
Steps are:
1. Digital Services = We supply digital services
2. Digitally-automated Spare Parts supply = We automate the supply of spare parts (and consumables) through condition monitoring and triggers (aka we build Machine Customers)
3. Reactive Connected Maintenance = We react to failures and restore the condition of products in shorter time thanks to remote diagnostic, historical analysis and remote configuration
4. Proactive Connected Maintenance = We guarantee our performance in restoring the condition of products thanks to proactive monitoring and guided maintenance practices
5. Connected Performance Advisory = We guide the capture of more value from products thanks to our knowledge, augmented by the insights we get from data
6. Connected Outcome-based Contracts = We guarantee the outcomes from products thanks to proactive monitoring, data insights, remote configuration and objective, data-based, risk analysis