Innovative View on Value Creation – Investigating Requirements for a Holistic Service Life Cycle Management

Service life cycle management refers to a strategy that supports service organisations and helps them recognise their gross income potential. This is done by examining the service opportunities proactively as a life cycle instead of a solitary event or set of discrete events. But in contrast to the traditional product life cycle management perspective, a corresponding and interlinked service life cycle approach is still in its infancy and empirical studies in this context are still rare. The chapter by Sabine Janeschek and Matthias Gouthier explores relevant requirements for a structured implementation of a service life cycle management concept, which could guide firms and support them to implement such an innovative service-oriented management approach in a more standardised way. The previous chapters have shown in different ways the significance of customer-centric business. Even in manufacturing fields like mechanical engineering, companies have identified the profit potential of industrial services like repair services, technical support, or trainings and in consequence have expanded their service portfolio. By offering added value through industrial services, a mechanical engineering company can differentiate its offerings and gain a competitive advantage, which is likely to result in an increase in sales and market share. To distinguish their services and products and gain long-lasting customer loyalty, particularly mechanical engineering and IT firms make use of service life cycle management. Service life cycle management is different from product life cycle management, which examines the entire life cycle of a product, rather than the organisation as a whole.