December 2021

A very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year from the Copperberg team!

Copperberg has, like many other organisations, reviewed and renewed our business model during the last period of time to fit the digital format even more.

One thing in particular that we focused on, and we will keep on focusing on when we go into our 10-year anniversary as a company next year, is the original content creation. This is the very foundation on which we built this organization.

As it is the end of the year, this is also a time for reflection. There’s some things that I’ve actually come to think about when I think back on this year and that I would like to highlight as I believe the will pave the way for further service business success.

One of the things that has become clear in the past 12 to 24 months, is that technology that might have been desirable or essential before the pandemic has now become vital for companies mere existence, without them.

We couldn’t have served our customers remotely nor could we have had insights into specific inventories or Supply chains? The fact that we are now not sitting in the same office anymore, has actually boosted the technology adoption and forced us to implement it in a different way. The deployment is higher. We also rely on it more now than we maybe did before. This is a clear trend.

I believe we will see a continuous growth in investments towards technologies that support your overall business objectives, when we have seen what it can bring to the table and therefore we will keep on exploring how we can optimize the use of that said technology in order to be better at our service delivery.

The abundance of data that we have access to, drives a possibility of true Corporate Performance Management into the very tiny details, but that also requires that everyone is looking at the same set of data at the same time.

This is something that has also been refined during this period of time because the fact that we’re not sitting in the same physical place anymore, caused a lack of knowledge sharing experience at the coffee machine or the small Monday meetings or, you name it. We had to create an anchor point in our discussions. That has come to be dashboards, platforms, even Excel spreadsheets or you share Google Sheets and everyone is looking at the same information, but that common truth and data insight has proven to be critical to keep on doing what we do on a daily basis.

The fact is also that data shines a light on where our weaknesses are when we start putting data into different dashboards and systems. It becomes evident where we are lacking a dataset and where we don’t have processes in place in order to acquire that data. As the aspect of the connected machinery and the predictive maintenance model is the forefront of service initiatives it is now vital to have a set of service metrics that you want to measure with your data.

Another part is that we discuss the outcome based contracts in the performance-based contracts. All of which also needs to be able to have an essence of measurability into them. Otherwise, they will fail.

The service business is undergoing a transformation.

We have been discussing the aging workforce for a long time so now when we haven’t had the opportunity to have our technicians in the field at the same scope, as we were used to, we’re now also losing that interaction between them and the more junior members. How do we bridge that gap? And how does the industry become an attractive employer for new talents?

We need to have a change management mindset to optimise the use of the technology. One person’s lack of understanding or lack of incentive to fill in data the right way might actually be harmful in the long run and can at times affect the customer.

Everything has a domino effect, and it’s our job as manufacturers to incentivize our colleagues to fill this out correctly. The question to be answered is always: So what’s in it for me? What I take from the many discussions I’ve had is that if you can showcase how these metrics make them perform better at work, in other words they become better at their job, this could also make sure that they are happier and therefore that is an incentive in itself.

The cliffhanger discussion: The concept of Value.

This is something we see that the service transformation model is moving towards. We speak about outcome-based. We speak about customer satisfaction. We speak about customer expectations. We throw around the Amazon name. And all of this is stemming from our consumer experience, an experience we transfer to our business personality.

That means that we also have to step up the game in terms of how we approach our customers. We see that many are undergoing the transformation to provide e-commerce for example, and that is often just to meet the customer in a digital, easily accessible, framework. Basically to make sure that the customer can find you when they want to. What they want to know about your products should be found first hand at your portal.

All of these aforementioned aspects embeds to the overall Service delivery. But when we speak of value, it’s an intangible measurement and hard to quantify. Therefore, it is also hard to sell. So if we’re going to sell outcome-based or performance-based, and we’re going to incorporate this concept of value in the more complex experience economy that the consumer and customer expects, how are we going to make sure that the sales operation aligns with the service operation?

Well, this is just a few thoughts on my end.

But yet again, I look forward to engaging further conversations with you next year and the team at Copperberg, and I, are so happy to have your support and once again a very Merry Christmas and they’re really happy New Year and see you online soon.

Lisa Hellqvist
Managing Director, Copperberg