While most of the companies are planning to grow their services significantly over the next five years, only slightly over half of the study participants have put in place a service strategy that aligns with their mission statement. “The extent to which company executives are leaving success to chance can be seen by making a direct comparison: companies that follow a separate service strategy are about one quarter more profitable than those who forego following a strategy,” according to Jan Sibold, Branch Manager for Mechanical and Plant Engineering with Staufen AG. However, the foundations supporting the development of a service strategy are always lean, value stream-oriented processes. Even in this area, many companies still need improvement if they want to keep up with ever-increasing competition. Only 14 percent of companies surveyed focus on stable and disturbance-free service processes. Instead, two-thirds place more value on response and delivery times. However, service can only react quickly if it has as its core a lean, waste-free organization. Companies that provide services based only on reaction speed, without having a sound foundation of lean principles in place to align the respective processes, are only dealing with symptoms, and not with the cause. When processes that are prone to disturbances dominate the day-to-day, they eat up significant personnel resources. The extent to which this can have an adverse effect is demonstrated by management’s workload. 88 percent of managers spend almost all of their time being involved at the operational level. A large portion of their time should be spent on making case-by-case decisions or even on “emergency interventions” for critical problems. Managers have less than one hour per day to spend on important tasks such as strategy and employee development, or continuous process improvement. Download the study and the management summary “Lean Service in Mechanical and Plant Engineering” Press release (.pdf) Press release (.rtf) Download the press graphics (in German)
