Beantown Bliss to Peachtown Preso

Tens of thousands of Red Sox Nation citizens (this blogger among them) lined the streets of Boston today to welcome home our victorious hardballers.

Present in the rolling cavalcade among the players, coaches, and front-office execs were Barry and Eliot Tatelman. Who? Anyone who owns a television in the northeastern U.S. knows that these brothers are the owners of local furniture retailer Jordan's Furniture. What does any of this have to do with Smart Services? Let me explain...

Back in the Spring, Barry and Eliot ran a promotion that entitled anyone who bought furniture before tax day to a full refund... if and only if the Red Sox won the World Series. So, on the morning of October 29th, the Tatelman brothers woke up owing a sum of more than $20 million to 35,000 customers. Of course, Jordan's had taken out an insurance policy that would cover their "losses," so no harm done.

As I watched the beaming brothers Tatelman rolling through the confetti blizzard, it struck me that this kind of marketing hubris is exactly what's needed to jumpstart the adoption of Smart Services among many OEMs' customer bases. I've mentioned before that the stakes in the Smart Services game are high and getting higher and the time for OEMs to place their bets is now. I've seen several examples of OEMs willing to take a short term risk by offering Smart Service-enabled support packages at no incremental charge to their customers for a finite period of time. And they're now enjoying the spoils of hearty recurring returns. Smart Services is part of a Horizon 2 business and needs to be run accordingly.

There will be plenty of time to explore this idea further at the upcoming Field Service - Long Cycle Forum 2007 in Atlanta, where I'll be making the presentation, Smart Services: A Game-Changer for Long-Cycle Service Organizations on November 13th. We're also hosting a dinner on November 12th at the nearby Spotted Dog. To reserve your spot on the guest list, just send a note to smartservices@qualcomm.com. Hope to see you in Peachtown!

CSOs in the house?

Sorry for the long hiatus between posts. It's been a busy start to Fall '07, including such happenings as:

- The 2nd Annual Chief Service Officer's Summit

- The 37th Annual S-Business World Conference

- A characteristically dramatic ALCS victory for my hometown Boston Red Sox.

As much as I'd like to devote today's post to the latter, there's just not much left to be said, with Boston's legion of storied sports writers penning hourly on new sub-plots and pre-Series melodrama... Except maybe, Go Sox!

So, on to the topic of the day: key insight from the CSO Summit. Keynote speaker Michael Treacy - author of Discipline of Market Leaders and other business books - encouraged delegates to Innovate, Learn, and Adapt in their service strategies. Against this backdrop, it struck me that many of the attending OEMs still hold the precarious view that service is mainly maintenance and repair.

The discussion panel in which I participated touched on the issue that the same forces of commoditization that squeeze products are acting upon mainstream services as well.

So, what does it mean to constantly innovate services? In the context of Smart Services, connecting serviceable equipment to a network is indeed an innovation, but not a competitively differentiable one, at least not over the long term. OEMs must constantly uncover new ways to exploit machine data to deliver new value-added services to their customers.

Preventing equipment from failing is a given. But OEMs that embed themselves in their customers' long-term asset management strategies will win in the end. Here are some ways leading OEMs are leveraging Smart Services to accomplish this:

- Track performance discrepancies among work shifts, to uncover training gaps

- Monitor energy consumption to comply with green regulations

- Provide system of record for customers' financial audits

- Identify asset interdependencies, and provide systemic asset performance optimization plans

- Maintain centralized asset knowledge repository in order to optimize the utilization of high-cost resources

What are some ways your company is going beyond break/fix with its smart service offerings? Post a comment, and tell us about it.