Strategic service management

Strategic Service Management, SSM, is a business strategy that optimizes a company's provided services through the effort of synchronizing: service parts and resources forecasting, service partners, workforce technicians, and service pricing.

Benefits of Strategic Service Management¹

• Revenue opportunity through the servicing of manufactured products experiencing decreased sales
• Leveraged customer loyalty through increased post-sale service performance
  • Faster resolution time for customer support service calls
• Heightened asset accountability and tracking
• Increased worker productivity
• More knowledgeable workers to prevent common mistakes

Best practices²

• Bring field service management and parts logistics under one operational umbrella
• Address process deficiencies, clearly defining required improvements and success criteria, before evaluating technology solutions
• Leverage partnerships with service and logistics providers
• Prioritize aftermarket service as a top-line business opportunity
• Involve stakeholders early and often in transformational process
• Adopt a two-pronged approach to measure the efficacy of after-market services: operational and strategic
• Ensure SSM strategy is integrated enterprise-wide
• Shift focus towards forecasting and planning: technician capacity and work order demand

Results from Strategic Service Management deployments³

• Avaya reduced Service parts inventory from $250 million to $160 million
• Sun Microsystems saved $40 million in the first year
• Dell grew service revenues over 20% in one year

See also

• Field Service Management
• Workforce management
• Market-Adaptive Pricing
• Service Parts Management
• Command Center

Footnotes

1. AberdeenGroup’s Industry Traction of Strategic Service Management, December 2005

2. AberdeenGroup’s Best Practices in Strategic Service Management Report , June 2005

3. Yes Ma’am That Part Is In Stock, BusinessWeek, August 1, 2005