Leveraging Service
to Win in
Industrial Markets

Catalysts for Growth &
Customer Value Creation

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Industrial companies need to create world-class service businesses to beat the competition and grow. Si2Partners is part of Si2-Group and supports organisations across many sectors to craft new service strategies and innovative business models. The common goal is to optimise operations, drive performance, technology adoption, and execute organisational transformation. Our consulting programs and workshops empower service leaders, managers, sales and technical personnel from all over the world.

About Us

Who we are

Based on many years of managerial, consulting and technical expertise, our partners all passionately believe that services are the cornerstone of industrial businesses success.

We are leaders in our fields who speak the language of our clients, who act as catalysts for change and improvement.

Clients return to us as they feel we are a genuine partner in their business journey.

Our Business

We help Service Leaders across various industries “Leverage Services to Win in their Industrial Markets”, as  they design, develop or deploy a sustainable service business.

We offer consulting solutions, business research, training and business execution support.

Si2’s Service Leaders Network offers collaborative problem solving to senior managers and practitioners. 
Meet the team
Meet our clients

Our Capabilities

We bring together capabilities covering most aspects of service businesses in industrial environments, from strategy and business model engineering, to technology and operations. 

Click on a section below to find out more’ about how Si2 can support your Service Leaders journey.

Strategy and Organizational Change

We develop and implement service-based strategies for growth and competitive advantage - and sustain them in the future
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Sales and Marketing Management

As B2B sales shift to digital platforms and companies expand their service portfolios, we help our clients adjust and optimize their practices
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Innovation and
Digital Services

We help clients align tech with business goals and manage implementation - enhancing operations and market success
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Operational Performance

We focus on the entire service value chain using proven Lean Six Sigma concepts and methodologies to eliminate waste, reduce cycle and throughput times and improve process and outcome quality.
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After Market and Lifecycle Development

We help our clients develop best-in-class after-sales service businesses. We help them clarify and articulate service intent, optimize service positioning within the organization and enhance product-service relationships.
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Execution and
Change

Our offerings are geared towards helping clients implement strategy, execute organizational transformation, develop their business or achieve an operational turnaround of an underperforming unit.
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Programs and Workshops

Service Value Sales Programme

Service and sales departments should collaborate for customized business solutions. This program fosters a customer-focused approach for effective solutions.

Service Value Sales Programme

Transforms professionals from Feature to Value Selling! – From a customer ‘push to a pull’ mindset!
Find out more here

Service Operations Assessment

A practical program to improve service processes and meet customer expectations.

Service Operations Assessment

Identify actions to improve service performance and customer experience
Find out more here

Service Portfolio Check

A creative and holistic programme that drives a customer value approach to service propositions, with the support processes for succesful implementation

Service Portfolio Check

Develop a portfolio, that supports strategy with compelling sales materials through a service savvy sales organisation

Accelerating the Trusted Advisor Journey

A programme for teams looking to accelerate the uptake of the Trusted Advisor mindset to increase customer loyalty and revenues

Accelerating the Trusted Advisor Journey

Enabling service people to communicate value and close deals
Find out more here

Digital Savvy Service Professionals

For teams looking to boost their teams understanding of how to use data and visualisation to increase productivity and tell compelling customer stories

Digital Savvy Service Professionals

Enabling professionals to visualise and action data.
Find out more here

Service Blueprint

A virtual program for teams looking to deliver service excellence by identifying all critical touchpoints, the key decisions to be made and the flow of information

Service Blueprint

Optimising Value at each Customer Interaction
Find out more here

Facilitated Team Workshops

Get your team together within a professionally facilitated workshop by people who know service, to align on key challenges and plan action

Facilitated Team Workshops

The facilitator relieves you of managing the discussion and documenting outcomes. You can focus on creativity, messaging, alignment and actions.

Individual & Team Coaching

For leaders, managers or teams going through changes in their role, structure or looking to develop behaviours and shared values.

Individual & Team Coaching

A unique blend of coaching skills as well as mentorship that comes from experienced service leaders

Leadership Team Programmes

Developing high performance global service teams through building team work, alignment and values

Leadership Team Programmes

Virtual, facilitated regionalised touchpoint meetings that engage and align service leaders around common goals and outcomes

Design Thinking for Service

Practical tips and coaching to incorporate Design Thinking principals into Service Design

Design Thinking for Service

For managers looking to a more customer centric approach to design their service offers and back-office processes.

Insights

Service in Industry

Deep dive into the industrial service business.

Join our community to receive analysis, insight, news and more.
We will never share your data

Service in Industry

Deep dive into the industrial service business.

Join our community to receive analysis, insight, news and more.
We will never share your data

Service Innovation for value-driven opportunities:

Facilitated by Professor Mairi McIntyre from the University of Warwick, the workshop explored service innovation processes that help us understand what makes our customers successful.

In particular, the Customer Value Iceberg principle goes beyond the typical Total Cost of Ownership view of the equipment world and explores how that equipment impacts the success of the business. It forces us to consider not only direct costs associated with usage of the equipment such but also indirect costs such as working capital and risks.

As an example, we looked at how MAN Truck UK used this method to develop services that went beyond the prevailing repairs, parts and maintenance to methods (through telematics and clever analytics) to monitor and improve the performance and  fuel consumption of their trucks. This approach helped grow their business by an order of magnitude over a number of years.

Mining Service Management Data to improve performance

We then took a deep dive into how Endress + Hauser have developed applications that can mine Service Management data to improve service performance:  

Thomas Fricke (Service Manager) and Enrico De Stasio (Head of Corporate Quality & Lean) facilitated a 3 hour discussion on their journey from idea to a real working application integrated into their Service processes. These were the key learning points that emerged:

Leadership

In 2018 the Senior leadership concluded that to stay competitive they needed to do far more to consolidate their global service data into a “data lake’ that could be used to improve their own service processes and bring more value to customers. As a company they had already seen the value of organising data as over the past 20 years for every new system they already had a “digital twin” which held electronically all the data for that system in an organised fashion. Initially, it was basic Bill of Material data, but has since grown in sophistication. So a good start but they needed to go further, and the leadership team committed resources to do this.

  • The first try: The project initially focused on collecting and organising data from its global service operations into a data lake.  This first phase required the development of infrastructure, processes and applications that could analyse service report data and turn it into actionable intelligence. The initial goal was to make internal processes more efficient, and so improve the customer experience. E+H looked for patterns in the reports of service engineers that could:
    • Be used to improve the performance of Service through processes and individuals
    • Be used by other groups such as engineering to improve and enhance product quality.
  • Outcome: Eventhough progress was made in many areas, nevertheless, even using advanced statistical methods, they could not extract or deliver the value they had hoped   for from the data. They needed to look at something different.
  • Leveraging AI technologies: The Endress+Hauser team knew they needed to look for patterns in large data sets. They had the knowledge that self-learning technologies that are frequently termed as AI, could potentially help solve this problem. They teamed up with a local university and created a project to develop a ‘Proof of Concept’. This helped the project gain traction as the potential of the application they had created started to emerge. It was not an easy journey and required “courage to trust the outcomes, see them fail and then learn from the process”. However after about 18 months they were able to integrate the application into their normal working processes where every day they scan the service reports from around the world in different languages to identify common patterns in product problems, or anomalies in the local service team activities. This information is fed back to the appropriate service teams for action. The application also acts as a central hub where anyone in the organisation can access and interrogate service report data to improve performance and develop new value propositions.
  • Improvement:  The project does not stop there. It is now embedded in the service operations and used as a basic tool for continuous improvement. In effect, this has shifted the whole organization to be more aware of the value of their data.

Utilizing AI in B2B services

Regarding AI, our task was to uncover some of the myths and benefits for service businesses and the first task was to agree on what we really mean by AI among the participants. It took time, but we discovered that there are really two interpretations which makes the term rather confusing. The first is a generic term used by visionaries and AI professionals to describe a world of intelligent machines and applications. Important at a social & macroeconomic level, but perhaps not so useful for business operations -at least at a practical level. The second is an umbrella term for a group of technologies that are good at finding patterns in large data sets (machine learning, neural networks, big data, computer vision), that can interface with human beings (Natural Language Processing) and that mimic human intelligence through being based on self-learning algorithms. Understanding this second definition and how these technologies can be used to overcome real business challenges is where the immediate value of AI sits for today’s businesses. It was also clear that the implication of integrating these technologies into business processes will require leaders to look at the change management challenges for their teams and customers.

To understand options for moving ahead at a practical level we first looked briefly at Husky through an interview with CIO Jean-Christophe Wiltz to CIOnet where we learned that i) real business needs should tailored drive technology implementation, and ii) that before getting to AI technologies, there is a need to build the appropriate infrastructure in terms of database and data collection, and, most importantly, the need to be prepared to continually adapt this infrastructure as the business needs change.