SerVa

Development of a description and evaluation approach for service variants for the portfolio planning for industrial services

The main goal of the project is the development of a description and evaluation approach for industrial service in the framework of portfolio planning. The competitive ability of SME shall be strengthened through an approach for the variant management of industrial services.

Customer requirements on individual solutions are constantly rising. The solutions are in large parts service components so that also capital goods producers have to enlarge their service portfolio. With this increasing demand service variants are expanded so that the intra-company complexity rises. Companies on the one hand have to meet the market demands but on the other hand need to design their portfolio in a way that the intra-company complexity of processes and resources remains controllable. In the context of the SerVa-project a methodology shall be designed that supports capital good producers to control the proliferation of variants and thereby to strengthen the SMEs’ competitive ability. The planned modeling tool supports companies by the detection of the consequences on the internal complexity when modifying the external complexity. With this knowledge SMEs can optimize their service variety efficiently.

The results of the project should be made available to a wide diversity of companies after terminating the project but also already during the runtime of the project in order to guarantee the applicability of the developed tool. A continuous spreading of the project results shall be pushed through national and international conferences, lectures, exhibitions and congresses in order to create added value for a great number of SMEs.