Service Life Cycle Management Market and Vendor Guide, 2012

12 November 2012 ID:G00234657
Analyst(s): William McNeill

VIEW SUMMARY

This research provides a concise listing of the service life cycle management categories and vendors covered by Gartner.

Overview

Key Findings

  • The service life cycle management (SLM) application market remains diverse, with large-scale suite providers offering portfolios of solutions, niche providers specializing in particular functional, geographic or industry-vertical markets, and innovative companies bringing new, value-added capabilities to market.
  • A fragmented service IT infrastructure inhibits advancement in maturity because it prevents the efficiencies gained through improved visibility, scalability and collaboration.
  • New capabilities, such as those in the Nexus of Forces (social, mobile, cloud and information), continue to emerge, solving new problems or providing more sources of business value.
  • Many companies are recognizing the need to move to solutions and create and/or improve their service businesses to improve overall corporate revenue, margins and profits.

Recommendations

  • Consider new sourcing options, such as SaaS or managed services, to gain the benefits of incrementally improved capabilities, without the traditionally large, upfront costs of on-premises applications as well as the potential for improved collaboration with customers or internally. Areas where SaaS is maturing quickly in SLM include, but are not limited to, field service, mobility and warranty management.
  • Focus as much attention on a vendor's ability to help your company exploit a given application through the vendor's functional expertise, services and support as you would features and functionality.
  • When creating a business case for investments in SLM software, collaborate with software vendors and their customers, as well as third-party sources, to collect compelling stories of ROI.

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Analysis

SLM Market Overview

Gartner defines SLM as "the processes and technologies that cover the discovery and fulfillment of service requests, including, but not limited to, contact center, remote monitoring, field service, spare parts planning, repair depot, warranty management and service knowledge management." SLM tends to be a fractured process, since it incorporates roles and responsibilities from various groups that often have different goals and measures. Typically, these groups have acted semiautonomously, with no management incentive, to synchronize their activities in the overall context of the business strategy. This limits the potential (read: profitability) of the overall service business. Metrics have been defined and reported independently, which often leads to conflicting outcomes. Leading service companies, however, bring these various roles together under one group or executive, and use common technology platforms.

The segments of SLM break down into four categories: service discovery, service fulfillment, service knowledge and business process services (BPS). Service discovery includes the processes and technologies that either predict or notify a company there is a service need. Service fulfillment covers all the technologies and processes needed to actually fix the assets. Service knowledge covers the processes and technologies that capture any and all data associated with the service event itself. BPS refers to the software, consulting and other services that focus on the improvement of the service business.

Figure 1. SLM Model
Figure 1.SLM Model

Source: Gartner (November 2012)

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In this research, Gartner breaks down the SLM market into the broad market segments shown in Figure 1. Within each section, we further break out the various applications into market subsegments that make up the larger segments, considering suites and the specialized components that either complement them or are stand-alone applications that support a specific need. In some cases, suite vendors — whether they're ERP providers, product life cycle management (PLM) vendors or supply chain management (SCM) specialists — appear in the major category and specialty areas, while some niche vendors might specialize in one area only.

Gartner provides a description for each application type, including what the application comprises. We also list key vendors that offer solutions for the application type. In each area, we list all vendors we're aware of at the time of publication. We'll periodically revise this vendor guide with new vendors, changes in ownership, or a vendor or offerings exiting a market. Where vendors offer multiple solutions, we note each offering separately. These categories do not exclusively represent all the technologies available in SLM; rather, these are the major categories where Gartner tracks the vendors. For example, while customer service contact center applications play an important role in service discovery, these vendors are already covered in the Gartner research note, "The Gartner CRM Vendor Guide, 2012."

  • Service discovery
    • Predictive support
    • Customer service contact center
  • Service fulfillment
    • Field service
    • Field service mobility
    • Returns/reverse logistics
    • Service parts planning
    • Maintenance, repair, and overhaul (MRO)
  • Service knowledge
    • Technical documentation
    • Warranty management
    • Warranty analytics
  • BPS
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Service Discovery

The way companies manage service requests is changing. While some can claim they proactively assess needs, most are simply reactive and ignore the opportunities. Many simply address service needs when a product breaks and customers call for support. Rather than just responding to problems, advanced service should be proactive, anticipating the needs of customers and considering options such as preventive maintenance, while on-site with the customer. Among the most illustrative examples of this is the use of condition-monitoring equipment placed in manufacturing sites. By taking constant readings on heat, vibration, noise and other factors, vendors can understand if there is a problem before equipment fails, or recalculate failure-rate expectations because of heavy or out-of-tolerance usage. Condition monitoring is also making its way into automotive, high-tech, medical device, consumer electronics and many other industries.

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Predictive Support

The capability for a company to proactively understand a service need before the customer is aware, such as assessing parts' and assemblies' mean time between failures, usage monitoring and condition monitoring is essential for companies to improve service maturity. This area covers asset performance management (APM), machine-to-machine (M2M) and analytic technologies. APM can include data capture, integration, visualization and analytics, tied together for the explicit purpose of improving the reliability and availability of physical assets. Analytics is characterized by a variety of approaches, including analyzing performance history, using sophisticated analytical tools to detect patterns and using operations intelligence (OI) capabilities to analyze real-time operating and condition data. It's important to combine historical service data and current operational data. Recent advances in wireless sensors and mobile technology have been rekindling interest in predictive support technologies. Another catalyst has been OEMs that develop smarter machines and new service offerings.

Predictive support capabilities, whether accomplished through real-time asset monitoring or analysis, are a major enabler of asset-intensive businesses improving their service maturity and taking asset performance to the next level. This area leverages the convergence of IT and operational technology (OT), and will require new skills that are familiar with both worlds' data structures and communication conventions. In some instances, companies looking at predictive support projects will benefit from cloud-based approaches to data sharing and multiparty collaboration.

Predictive Support Vendors
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Customer Service Contact Center

Customer service contact center applications are already covered in the Gartner research note, "The Gartner CRM Vendor Guide, 2012."

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Service Fulfillment

Executing service is crucial to brand building. It is the place where consistent opportunity arises to define further sales opportunities, understand customer needs and exceed customer expectations. Integrated systems allow organizations to manage scheduling, dispatch people, manage parts availability and arm technicians with the accurate and timely information stored in the knowledge repository.

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Field Service

Field service applications should have the scope to achieve five objectives:

  1. Receive requests for a field service technician from a call center, the Internet, telephone or intelligent device.
  2. Assign a service technician, with long, midrange, weekly and intraday optimization of the technician's work orders, factoring in constraints (e.g., assets, skills, etc) and improved service-level agreement (SLA) compliance.
  3. Complete mobilization of the technician to perform end-to-end service tasks, including the ability to look up inventory status in real time or cached on a wireless device.
  4. Integrate with GPS and GIS capabilities.
  5. Provide field service functionality that supports a continuum of field service models, from reactive to preventive, to predictive to reliability-centered maintenance.

The importance of individual components will vary by industry. Optimization, for example, is important to companies with a high number of technicians and complex scheduling rules like in telecommunications and utilities. Repair depot functionality rises in importance for companies that have customers send product back to a central facility or run individual service centers. The business usually employs one of three business models:

  1. OEM-performed installation, maintenance and repair
  2. Field service for asset-intensive businesses — for example, manufacturing plants, utilities and telecommunications (this is the predominant model)
  3. Third-party (outsourced) maintenance and repair (this is the most complex model because the management of parts, contracts and warranties — essentially ERP, SCM and PLM functions — is not under the vendor's control and, instead, must accommodate the needs and capabilities of contractors)

Field service is increasingly viewed as an integral part of a unified customer strategy that's improved over time as part of a careful project. This can also be thought of as SLM or service resource planning. It is as integral as sales, marketing and customer support to product-centric businesses. Another factor bringing field service into focus for many North American and European enterprises is the aging workforce, and the challenges associated with passing along process and customer knowledge to new employees, while, at the same time, reducing or keeping head count flat. This makes the efficiencies gained by field service management (FSM) suites and mobile automation key mitigating tactics. Niche vendors will need to improve the service orientation of their applications to better integrate with others, or else they will fail.

The market for FSM tools remains highly fragmented, and breaks out into four main areas:

  1. Best-of-breed field workforce optimization vendors, such as TOA and ClickSoftware.
  2. Vendors that provide most of an end-to-end suite, although not necessarily with all components being best in class (such as Oracle, SAP, Astea International and Servigistics)
  3. Niche vendors of field mobility solutions or platforms, whose application frameworks are good alternatives for many organizations that want to innovate their field technician processes, while leaving their back-end ERP systems largely unchanged (for example, Antenna, Cognito, and Retriever Communications)
  4. Vendors focused primarily on a single industry (Ventyx), small or midsize businesses (SMBs) (Marathon Data Systems), or a particular geography (such as Comarch)

The vendors in this section offer field service mobile applications to complement their field service suite. However, they do not appear below in the section Field Service Mobility Vendors, which features vendors that are mostly or completely mobile.

Field Service Vendors
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Field Service Mobility

Most, if not all, of the vendors mentioned above in the field service section have a mobile application for field service. This section deals primarily with the vendors that are mostly or completely mobile, or provide mobile platforms that support other business processes in addition to field service. These vendors are appropriate for a company looking to complement its current field service investments. The software needs to support the tasks in the above section for field service, some of which occur on a website, and others through automation (remote monitoring and intelligent device management), phone calls or site visits. Technicians often require some type of wireless mobile device through which to communicate and complete the service process. In field service, there is a lot of diversity in the types of devices, including (in rough order of frequency) ruggedized handhelds, ruggedized or standard notebooks, consumer smartphones, and consumer-grade or ruggedized tablets. For all these device types, except notebooks, the mobile software landscape continues to evolve:

  • The iOS and Android operating systems are the most often discussed in Gartner inquiries for consumer-grade smartphones, with Research In Motion's (RIM's) BlackBerry a distant third. Nokia is now shipping Windows devices, for all intents and purposes abandoning the Symbian OS. RIM has announced its commitment to QNX, rather than the BlackBerry OS.
  • iPads are leading a pack of new tablet offerings that include Android and other OS options.
  • The rollout of Windows 8, which incorporates the design language of Windows Phone, has the potential to revitalize interest in Windows-based smartphones as well as impact the design of tablet-based applications.

Because Windows Phone 7 is not backward-compatible with older versions of Windows Mobile, for which many mobile applications, including field service, have been optimized, enterprises now have reasons to reconsider the entire client-side software implementation. All vendors surveyed are considering support for iOS and Android devices, although strategies vary. While vendors have not yet announced their plans for Windows 8 support, its introduction has the potential to reshape the nature of tablet-based field service applications by supporting a class of tablets that combines PC-level capabilities, with tablet portability and ease of use.

Another disruptive element in mobile is the rapidly advancing interest in HTML5 and the possibility to support disconnected field service applications, without having to resort to native code development. While HTML5 has a lot of potential, there are still some current limitations including the in-browser data store and the lack of access to peripherals, such as printers. Some device vendors have created extended versions of HTML to address such issues, and a lot of software developers use hybrid solutions, with tools such as PhoneGap, to blend HTML5 and bits of native code into a form which can be delivered as a native solution.

Additionally, the mix of device types is changing, with enterprises considering replacing ruggedized laptops with inexpensive media tablets — initially, iPads for many organizations. Gartner envisions that business processes will be shaped increasingly to rely on the new capabilities of evolving mobile devices, platforms and applications. By 2014, we expect most vendors to revamp the user experience portion of their offerings to be mobile-first or mobile-only for field technicians. This does not mean, however, that there will be a complete overhaul overnight. Industrial-grade devices still have good support for peripherals like printers, RFID, USB ports (to plug into equipment diagnostics) and bar code readers, whereas most consumer devices don't. This causes some clunky workarounds, and may also imply a need for certain features in software products and constraints on platform choices. We are seeing a shift away from ruggedized devices running Windows to those running Android (either in ruggedized form or through consumer-grade devices). But, again, it's not a wholesale replacement by any means. The adoption and interest in consumer devices is mostly coming from telecommunications, financial services and some areas of high-tech, but we are seeing interest and receiving some inquiries from heavy industries like oil and gas and heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC).

Field Service Mobility Vendors
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MRO

MRO supply chains are evolving, and new approaches/business models are emerging. A new model of MRO supply chains is needed to help practitioners understand the impact on their organization, learn from leaders and manage change. The model needs to be comprehensive enough to reflect industry differences as well as the different roles played by different MRO supply chain participants. And it must provide a framework for organizational change management and technology adoption.

Every model starts with an understanding of high-level processes. In the case of MRO supply chains, those processes are a reflection of the life cycle of the asset(s). There are two major stages in asset life cycle management — the installation/commissioning phase and the operational/sustaining phase. In industries with large, complex and often regulated assets, there might also be a hybrid stage — often called overhaul or, in the case of 24/7 operations, shutdown/turnaround. Overhauls or turnarounds, like the original installation/commissioning phase, are major engineering projects during which the asset(s) are not available for their intended use. Often overlooked is the impact of the design/engineering and decommissioning/disposal phases on the full life cycle — or life span — of an asset.

Surrounding all phases in the life of major assets are the concepts of asset life cycle management and continuous improvement. Optimizing the use of an asset is dependent on a more integrated flow of information from one phase to the next, as well as a greater degree of collaboration between parties than has historically been the case. Information disconnects, in particular, lead to duplication of effort and an increased likelihood of error down the road. The benefits flow both ways when there is a seamless flow of information between the parties. It enables continuous improvement in the operational phase, improved design of equipment procured in the installation phase and sustainable use for the full life of the asset.

Planning in the MRO supply chain world is not unlike planning in the product supply chain world, in that you are balancing between demand and supply as well as the design of the asset. In the installation phase, it's a build or configure-to-order challenge, based on a well-defined specification. In the operational/sustaining phase, it's an asset utilization challenge. A plane in a maintenance bay or an air compressor locked out for maintenance is not making money for the owner. Quite the contrary! They are incurring costs. In both phases, it's a matter of effective and efficient resource and material scheduling.

New to the MRO supply chain world is an increased focus on the decommissioning and disposal of assets at the end of their useful life. The major assets at the center of MRO supply chain processes are often long-lived assets, so there is a tendency to not consider end of life until it looms in front of the asset owner. Some asset owners do consider end of life in the sense of the residual value of the assets but, as governments and the public turn their attention to the environmental implications of waste, it will become a focal point for all players in the MRO supply chain. As a result, organizations are beginning to factor end of life into the design, procurement and installation processes of the MRO supply chain. The vendors in this section can manage most, if not all, stages of the MRO supply chain. Specialists for one particular piece of functionality are not listed here. For example, vendors that only plan service parts inventory for MRO are listed in the Service Parts section of this research.

MRO Vendors
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Returns/Reverse Logistics

Returns are a significant problem for companies in business-to-consumer (B2C) and B2B environments. In the U.S. alone, the costs of reverse logistics are estimated at more than $35 billion per year — or roughly 4% of total logistics costs. Product returns, a significant aspect of reverse-logistics activities, average around 6% of sales, though this varies by product and industry type. Although they are a significant problem for many companies, returns continue to be of secondary consideration for most organizations, and little IT spending has focused on automating the returns process. Most organizations live with labor-intensive, manual, often undisciplined and inefficient returns management (RM) processes because they continue to prioritize supply-chain-related IT investments on outbound projects (e.g., order management and fulfillment). As companies complete their outbound projects, RM will become increasingly important. This is significant when you consider the cost of a return is three times the cost of an order. By redefining the return supply chain, companies can create significant opportunities to improve value and strengthen brand presence.

In most companies, the process of product returns needs an overhaul. Consider these facts:

  • The returns process is long. Asset value recovered (AVR) cycle time is 55 days. AVR cycle time is the time from product arrival (customer purchases product) to product disposition (customer has returned the product and company has completed the disposition decision: repair, refurbish, liquidate, recycle or scrap).
  • The process is also costly. Returns as a percentage of revenue vary from 6% to 14%, depending on the product and life cycle stage. The cost of processing returns is 2.7 times greater than an outbound shipment.

This reality results from a series of obstacles faced in the returns value network: No standard, reliable IT solution, lack of visibility to returned goods, inconsistent processes across global and product teams, and insufficient organizational incentives and focus.

One of the obstacles in managing returns is data. Too few companies have clean and timely data to drive decisions. We've found that few companies have a single point of contact that could provide a complete dataset for all of their returns. Most companies, on average, have three to four respondents to get the data. Companies that manage product returns the best have integrated the data and aligned on measurement. The software needed to support reverse logistics is often part of larger suites. The following vendors, however, have much of the functionality needed to address this process.

Returns/Reverse Logistics Vendors
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Service Parts Planning

Gartner defines service parts planning as an extension to supply chain planning (SCP), targeting the specific needs of service and repair parts forecasting/demand planning, inventory planning and replenishment planning. Although sharing similar capabilities with SCP, service parts planning must model and support the particular features required to address the distinctive needs of service parts. The vendors included in this research offer solutions that contain most, but not necessarily all, of the specific service parts planning functionality.

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Core Service Parts Planning Capabilities

Specific requirements are universally necessary for planning service parts that must be addressed by service parts planning applications:

  • Supporting very large numbers of SKUs, often millions of parts/location combinations
  • Significant item cost variability, from very low (less than $1) to high (more than $1,000)
  • Significant item demand variability, from very low (a few pieces per year) to high (many pieces per week)
  • Low levels of demand predictability
  • Highly sporadic and intermittent demands
  • Need for specialized techniques, such as Croston's forecasting method, to address intermittent demand
  • Addressing the operational impact of high levels of part obsolescence
  • Where possible, using predictive techniques, such as mean time between failures (MTBF)
  • Supporting part substitutability and super session
  • Helping plan returns and repairs (that is, reverse logistics)
  • Supporting kitting and other forms of dependent demands
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Advanced Service Parts Planning Capabilities

  • Networkwide optimization that minimizes total systemwide parts cost, while meeting service targets and systemwide considerations and constraints
  • Causal forecasting that uses historical predictive metrics (e.g., MTBF per hours of operation)
  • Better forecasting methodologies, such as Croston's method or variations of it, and techniques, such as fractional forecasting, for addressing highly sporadic, intermittent and low-volume demands
  • Networkwide safety stock optimization versus bottom-up (referred to as multiechelon inventory optimization)
  • Flexible and more robust part segmentation beyond simple ABC classifications
  • Sourcing and replenishing parts horizontally across stocking locations (such as depot to depot), versus fixed, hierarchical source destination pairing, such as depots sourced only from regional warehouses that are then supplied by the central warehouse
  • Asset/product bill of materials (BOM) built into planning process (that is, as used or as configured)
  • Visibility into contractual obligations, such as service lead-time and SLAs
  • Ability to forecast material requirements, based on asset populations
  • Parts planning, considering those in use and the erosion of asset populations
  • Ability to model SLAs, including a complex array of parts by order, customer and/or channel across a network (sourced from one or more locations)
SPP Vendors
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Service Knowledge

Vital to meeting and exceeding customer expectations is access to information about the installed base and product information. This repository should capture and provide all information to respond to questions quickly and intelligently, while also assessing needs proactively. Often, this information is stored within an existing CRM system, but it's far more than a customer contact and sales portal. This knowledge repository also needs to capture and supply repair information, warranty and contract entitlements, and compliance information. Ideally, this information would feed back into design and engineering systems to create a closed feedback loop to improve quality.

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Technical Documentation

Companies that sell products with long service life cycles have long relied on services for much of their profits. Capturing and sharing information on product upgrades and determining what customers need in terms of additional products and services help them stay relevant to their customers throughout a product's entire life cycle. Getting the right part to the right customer at the right time to minimize customer downtime is also paramount for customer satisfaction. Additionally, many leading companies in this space are looking for innovative ways to share and distribute product and technical documentation to dramatically reduce customer response time, improve satisfaction levels and assist with regulatory compliance issues.

Products with long service life cycles in the field for many years eventually end up with multiple variations of equipment configurations and service histories at each customer site. Accurate technical documentation keeps track of each customer's installed systems, making field service much more efficient. For short life cycles, companies introduce new products so rapidly that they often can't get the technical documentation out fast enough to support installation and repair. This can lead to returns of materials that are not malfunctioning, and needlessly higher inventory levels.

Accurate, up-to-date technical documentation leads to proper installation and service of product. Companies report that technicians spend 15% to 20% of their time in the field looking up information, but using technical documentation software can reduce the time by 80%.

Many PLM vendors offer some technical documentation functionality as well. Many have recognized the value of the engineering information their systems hold to service, and others have created partnerships with leading CRM vendors to expose this information for help in service and sales.

Before investing, companies must assess their current information systems and the accuracy of the initial data being loaded into the system. Companies that have acquired several other entities may have documentation scattered throughout the organization in all types of forms. Automating technical documentation won't be successful unless the data is clean and the system can pull accurate installed base information for each customer. Techniques range from converting documents to XML streams to simple scanning.

Technical Documentation Vendors
Warranty Management

According to Warranty Week, U.S. manufacturers alone spend more than $25 billion every year honoring warranties, and they're looking for ways to reduce this spending. Gartner has found that better collaboration between organizations — and within an organization, too — can help reduce the financial burden presented by warranties.

Warranties are a liability and an opportunity. As a financial liability, they promise to provide service to ensure a purchased item performs to expectations within a predefined period, requiring companies to set aside a certain percentage of revenue to pay for claims. When claims are submitted under the warranty period, the manufacturer must pay in the form of either service or a refund. Warranty returns aren't the same as general returns, which affect net revenue, not warranty reserves. Companies realize value when reserves exceed costs.

Another path to value is through the sale of extended warranties, but this can also complicate the warranty process. Although companies will externally claim to have a streamlined process, it's a veneer. In reality, there's a lack of standard processes, measurements and supporting IT. However, if properly managed, warranty programs can be an asset by focusing on the total contribution to the brand by continuously gathering downstream data on product use and quality. But capitalizing on this downstream data to enhance a product's utility and reliability remains a gap for most companies.

The processes for warranty management activities are very fragmented and in urgent need of a designated leader, along with clearly defined cross-functional processes, which few companies possess. Although leading companies have a formal warranty management board to oversee all activities touching the warranty process, most companies continue to have siloed processes that isolate the warranty process from demand management, new product and service supply, and product innovation processes. This prevents them from extracting all potential value and savings from the warranty process.

In an effort to control costs and internalize product performance for continuous improvement upstream, warranty management and the service supply chain that supports it are rising in importance on the supply chain agenda. Leading companies analyze the feedback from repair networks to pinpoint patterns in product performance, identify supplier issues, decrease cycle times for detection to resolution and prevent fraudulent claims. As product complexity and the use of embedded software systems increase, this closed-loop processing of information — also called warranty analytics — grows in importance. Closing the loop between service and product design can help take a bite out of that $25 billion spent every year on honoring warranties. Just consider the case of one major automotive OEM — it reduced the amount of money in the warranty reserve by one-half over a four-year period.

Warranty Management Vendors
Warranty Analytics

Gartner defines business intelligence (BI) for service as a set of tools, applications and processes that helps companies control, manage and understand the operational performance of their service networks. It combines operating metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) from across the service network to deliver a clear, comprehensive picture of how the service business is performing, affecting such service disciplines as customer satisfaction and retention, inventory investments, vendor/supplier performance and planning.

In warranty management, the top drivers for investment usually include detecting patterns in product performance, identify supplier issues, decrease cycle times for detection to resolution and prevent fraudulent claims. As product complexity and the use of embedded software systems increase, this closed-loop processing of information grows in importance.

Service professionals should reach out to IT to see if there's a corporate standard for BI. They should also inquire to other areas of the business to see if anyone else is using BI software. While most BI vendors don't focus as much on service businesses per se, there's really no reason why they shouldn't be considered as part of an evaluation.

A few vendors are building out specific products for service professionals. This typically requires professionals knowledgeable in the metrics to be supported, the specific changes needed for workflows and the algorithms to be used for forecasting and optimization. Best-of-breed providers as well as broader service, ERP, SCM and PLM suites are releasing specialized warranty analytics modules. Sentiment analysis is also being used by a subsegment of vendors for this area. Additionally, service providers are building out analytical platforms for customers, and we list those vendors below in the Business Process Services section of this research note.

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Consulting, Implementation and Business Process Services

As profit margins decrease on manufactured goods due to increased global competition, price deflation and rising commodity costs, many companies are looking for alternative sources of profit and revenue growth. One potential area of opportunity is service, with many companies examining ways to increase service revenue or offer additional add-on services.

Many product-centric companies are becoming more focused on solutions, which contain product and service offerings. However, just because a company says it's focused on or cares about the customer doesn't automatically mean they're in higher stages of transformation. The proper underlying organization, culture and technology must be in place to truly enable collaboration and customer-driven outcomes.

Transforming to a customer-oriented, solution-based company requires the mastery of new process skills, organizational principles and technology. Often, this requires outside expertise.

The demand-driven transformation can take years, and aligning services to this corporate strategy can be challenging. Although many organizations start by focusing on projects to improve the efficiency and costs of service processes by implementing enabling technology, the greatest gains are achieved by addressing the goal, cultural and organizational elements — and doing this first. Without a goal to mature and close gaps, the cultural change and full transformation can't happen, and the best a company can hope for is entry into Stage 3. Visionary leadership, constant persuasion, cross-organizational efforts and metric alignment are essential to sustaining continued progress and, ultimately, for achieving success.

Engagements with service providers can be categorized in many ways. At a macrolevel, work can be broken into three disciplines:

  • Consulting — Including strategy, conceptual design, process redesign and benchmarking
  • Implementation — Incorporating configuration, deployment and go-live of technology
  • BPO — Where aftermarket processes are delivered by the services firm on behalf of the buyer

The firms included in this section offer more than just implementation services. This section is not about service providers that can help implement the software featured in this research. Many of the software providers included in this research have official partnerships with service providers for implementations. This section also does not cover providers of physical supply chain execution services (e.g., ModusLink, UPS, Ryder, Genco, Jabil, etc.).

The service providers in this section offer services with the aim of improving a service business, either through consulting, process redesign, benchmarking or value-added BPO. Typical areas of focus for these service providers include customer service, contact center management, field service, service parts management, returns, reverse logistics and warranty management.

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