A Perfect Invoice That Matches a Perfect Service Experience 

The rise of servitization in short: changing product-driven business models to more service or outcome-driven, has led to great opportunities in the manufacturing industry. Themes like Industry 4.0 and IoT-driven demand have opened opportunities for manufacturing to create an additional recurring revenue stream. Manufacturers transform their business models to better align themselves with the needs of their clients. But what does this mean for their billing and monetization?

Why an ecosystem in the first place? 

What are the 7 qualities of supporting software?

Parties forming a service ecosystem, understand that by combining their strengths they can serve their common clientele better than without one.

A service ecosystem is centrally operated and targets are shared. All parties add value to it and receive value from it. 

Scalability is a common factor to fast growing and profitable service businesses. It is not only about the ability to manage changes in volume. It also calls for capabilities to quickly respond to market changes with service content and pricing flexibility. And it is also about lowering unit costs when volumes grow. In my blog post Why Scalability Matters in Service business I talked about scalability and what it means. This time I will share some best practises you should consider when moving towards automated monetization.

Good ERP system is an essential tool to support product sales, manufacturing, warehousing, delivery and billing.

However, the ERP mode of operation ‘A Leads to B’, does not support scalable transformation to recurring revenue business models. Specifically, the kind of services requiring advanced variable usage-based pricing are difficult for ERP systems.

Have you ever wondered why this is? 

The other day I attended an event where sales coach Mika D. Rubanovitsch @Rubanovitsch was talking about sales, marketing and customer behavior.

His key statement was that the buying behavior of customers is changing way faster than companies’ ability to create desirable offering.

This led me to a thinking process pondering what and why - and how to avoid such.

Who Drives the Offering?

Should we trash what we learnt in business school about strategically developing our offering to the focal point matching our core competency and the needs of our carefully selected customer segment(s)? Hitting the sweet spot produces such a compelling reason to buy that success follows automatically.

How Digital Platforms May Disrupt Manufacturing Industry:

New Ecosystem Business Models Can Utilize 97% More Capacity 

In his podcast interview CEO Thomas Hedenborg states:

“There are studies testifying that only 3% of total installed manufacturing capacity is utilized. The one who creates a platform that connects this ample underutilized resource to a need is sitting on a gold mine.”