BestServ: Managing Service Business: Winning best practices and success stories

Industrial service business is a fast-growing business area within engineering and manufacturing. In order to create new business, many companies have tried to develop industrial services – but many of these have failed. Often, customers have not appreciated the service models proposed due to lack innovativeness (i.e. added value) in comparison with current co-operation models between suppliers and customers. This publication will summarise the findings based on the BestServ Forum, a collaborative forum of 32 Finnish enterprises operating in the manufacturing industry. The objective of the forum is to benchmark best practises, establish current status, development needs and future challenges related to services business in the Finnish industry, non-exclusively focusing on the manufacturing industry. In addition to such industry-oriented objectives, the forum has identified topics for future research and development. This publication will report some of the findings of this forum. It will also provide insight into potential research topics in the area of industrial services. This publication will approach the challenges from a business model viewpoint and also present a collection of case studies and best practices with regard to services business collected by the BestServ Round Table Groups. The case studies and best practices cover a variety of businesses implementing various types of business models. The authors have utilised the work of the BestServ Forum and the BestServ Round Tables carried out since the forum started its work. The text is further based on existing research and public case studies, which have been referred in the text.