Last week I ran another of our latest Skills for Servitization one-day courses, with help from two of my Advanced Services Group colleagues, Dr Ali Bigdeli, Senior Research Fellow and Jekaterina Dmitrijeva, a doctoral researcher. The course aims to equip individuals with the tools and processes they need to be able to servitize a manufacturing company, with an emphasis on developing outcome-based advanced services.
We had an interesting mix of delegates from companies of varying sizes, ranging in employee numbers from a handful up to thousands. This allowed for some interesting and thought-provoking discussion about how the principles and tools can be applied to different businesses, and where the commonalities lie.
In general, the size of a business makes little overall difference to the relevance and potential for competing through services. While larger businesses have more resources to throw behind an initiative, smaller ones tend to have fewer layers of authorisation and decision making and can move more quickly.
What matters more is that the company has a strong product that is reliable, and most importantly has employees who are willing to get out there and work hard to understand the needs of the customer, grasp the structure of the wider value network, and come up with offerings that help solve an important problem.
I thoroughly enjoyed exploring these challenges and the tasks ahead with the delegates, taking them through some of the first steps to explore customers’ needs and develop a value proposition, and with the online resources made available to them to employ back at the workplace, combined with the confidence to use their newly developed skills, I fully expect them all to make some real progress very soon.
It’s always a bonus when the participants have not only learned but enjoyed themselves in the process. The feedback at the end of the day showed an approval rating on the quality of material at nearly 90% and more than half of the delegates were confident that from just this one day course that they could now go and actually adopt services in their business!
We have a number of course dates lined up for next year, so if you want to brush up your skills in a day, why not sign up?