Procuring industrial service solutions, Exploring enablers for co-creating value

Optimizing complex hardware and services into service solutions may significantly reduce the total product life-cycle cost for a customer. Research regarding the customers' perspective is still scarce, however. Hence, the purpose of this paper is to explore value perceptions among buyers of industrial service solutions developed for complex product platforms. The study is based on the experiences of one commercial and three governmental customers procuring service solutions for aviation products. As could be expected, direct financial benefits in the form of cost reduction were an important motive for the studied organizations. In reality, however, it turned out to be difficult to verify if these goals had been fulfilled. This may be seen both as an indicator of the complexity of the business, and the lack of clear baseline data, when the new service provider entered the field. Still, the customers were satisfied with the partnership, with several of them eager to learn from the provider, even if the learning process was painful. During the procurement process itself the quality and richness of the relationship with the new partner was important for signaling capability. End-users, however, seemed to be under-used and not sufficiently involved in the relationship during this process. The results also show that continuous proposals for improvements from the service provider are highly valued among customers. (C) 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.