Services have become an important factor for strategic differentiation and a driver for growing revenues. Thus Service Excellence has turned into one of the key factors for overall success. Smart services that are enabled by data gathered from the installed base in the field have now become the next step in Service Excellence. The benchmarking provides an overview on the state of the art in offering smart services, enabling the participants to compare themselves with Successful Practice companies and thus leveraging the hidden potential of their service business.

While the technological side of smart services is well developed in many cases, companies often struggle to economically take advantage of their services. Key success factors for establishing a sustainable and economically profitable smart service business are to have the right knowledge about necessary resources and capabilities to address a customer's competitive priorities, formulating perfectly fitting smart service offerings, creating as well as selling them and being able to overcome existing barriers to the offering of smart services. Innovative forms of partnering become crucial for the strategic positioning in value creating networks.

Five companies were chosen as Successful Practice companies in this benchmarking:

• Alfred Kärcher GmbH & Co. KG
• Heidelberg Druckmaschinen AG
• John Deere GmbH & Co. KG
• Nordex Energy GmbH
• Schindler Management AG

To get the benchmarking report without participating in the benchmarking please contact us for further details.