The Management of Service Business

By focusing on the management aspects of the service business for large systems and installations, this book aims at closing the gap in technical literature regarding this subject. It covers all relevant management aspects of this business, like strategy, planning, sales, competition, contracts, and operations. It further gives hints for setting up an international service business and explains the role of of technology and innovation. This second edition includes two new chapters. The fist introduces a new approach for expressing the value of service in monetary terms. The second presents a methodology for valuating a service business. The book addresses systems and installations companies and their service departments, providing them guidance on how to improve the capitalization on the service opportunities yielded by their own installations and to establish service as a strong business pillar generating solid revenues. It also provides valuable information for generic service companies with no own installations business. Target readers are as well customers who operate large systems and installations, to help them in finding the best possible service provider for their technical assets. For suppliers and customers, the book gives advice on how to establish a trustful customer-supplier relationship. Finally, the book addresses young people at the starting point of a manager career in the field of technical services.

I'm Christian M. Wegner. After finishing my studies in electrical engineering, I started my professional activity as a service engineer for industrial computer systems. With the increasing trend towards service outsourcing in the beginning of this century, my area of activity changed into the field of industrial maintenance, where I was acting as project manager, head of business development, and product manager. During the last 10 years of active professional activity, I was privileged of heading one of the largest service organizations worldwide, and for certain the largest one in the field of logistic systems. We proudly served and continue to serve most of the large airports as well as the most important mail and parcel companies worldwide. We succeeded in establishing service as a business of significant size, equally important in our company as the systems and installations one. The continuous development of our service business was an important step in making our company a genuine life-cycle partner of our customers. This was the most rewarding time of my career.