If you are an OEM and want to offer services in addition to your products, you will certainly need a software that will manage your connected products and allow digital servitization.

For this type of software, you will face with the choice “Make or Buy?”.

You may be tempted to choose “Make”, considering that a proprietary solution allows more control, lower costs or having 100% of the intellectual property of what you develop. However, by choosing “Make”, you will have to face some relevant issue, like:

• Lack of experience and internal knowledge regarding servitization, with the risk to waste a lot of energy, falling into avoidable errors, and solving problems already solved by others.
• High development and set-up costs, resulting from the lack of experience and knowledge mentioned above.
• Release times often inadequate compared to the desired timing, with the risk of getting a result too late.
• Maintenance costs to ensure the quality, reliability, and evolution of the system.
• Scalability of the solution according to the growth of the business (100, 1.000, 10.000 connected products), also on a worldwide scale.

The advantages of “Make” do not always overcome these problems. Furthermore, a “Buy” solution could also guarantee the same advantages: control of the solution, sustainable costs, and the intellectual property of the solution.

Leaving aside initial costs and times that could be sustainable for you, if you want to undertake the servitization journey, the most critical part to consider, once the product is connected, is how to create services that can evolve over time, while remaining competitive, up the delivery of a “Product as a Service”.

We are living in a period in which the competitive difference between manufacturers in terms of performance and quality is smoothing; this is why the differentiating factor in choosing a manufacturer will always be more the quality, reliability, and price of the service provided. For manufacturers, therefore, it will be crucial to offer increasingly innovative services, with ever lower internal costs.

The choice of a software for connecting products and digital servitization, affect the service provided and the ability of the latter to evolve over time. To grow a proprietary solution you must continuously allocate resources, and thus the “Make or Buy” dilemma reopens. Considering “Make”, the development and management of a product servicing system could represent a major bottleneck to business development.

To remain competitive, you must aim for continuous improvement, and if the software is limited, also the service offered with it will be limited too.

Servitly is an enterprise Software-as-a-service for Digital Servitization. It is constantly evolving, ahead of OEM needs. Every 2 weeks we release new features thanks to a rich pipeline, that is constantly fed by our market researches and requests from our customers.

The needs of a specific application domain can often be translated into a reusable functionality in other domains, without reinventing the wheel every time.

Do you want to offer a Service?

If you want to “servitize” your business model, then it is convenient that the tools needed to achieve this goal are services. This allows you to keep costs under control, maximizing ROI, and allowing the rapid evolution of the service over time.

Thanks to an as-a-service approach, at each release we automatically provide new features, without additional setup costs, immediately applicable to your service. An as-a-service software for Digital Servitization like Servitly allows you to avoid spending energy in thinking about how to do things or developing them from scratch, and mostly it allows you to start quickly with controlled costs commensurated with the size of the business.

Make or Buy? Make it yours!

Using an as-a-service software could trigger the doubt that your solution will not be unique, but this is equivalent to saying, for example, that all WordPress-based sites are identical, or that all companies that use Salesforce have the same success in customer relations. Clearly, this is not the case! The difference is within the contents, the know-how that each company puts into the tools it uses. With Servitly it is the same. In creating Servitly and all its ready-to-use features we have always given all the necessary space to our customers’ know-how, to allow a deep differentiation. In fact, through Servitly it is possible to:

• configure the visual identity of your company, with brand, colors, texts, iconography, patterns and distinctive images;
• configure your product catalog, with the features, statuses, data, parameters, configurations, alerts, consumables, processing types of each model;
• configure your logics and algorithms to be applied to data;
• configure your value chain (distributors, dealers, installers, maintainers, etc.) and how all external actors interact with the system;
• configure the smart services through your know-how (consumption monitoring, usage advice, troubleshooting, etc.);
• configure and customize all the data, events, reports and graphics views that you want to make available to users;
• configure your subscriptions and pricing model.

The product + service system has a greater value than the sum of its components. The services (digital and non-digital) in support of the product can be combined to create a unique and distinctive solution, and sometimes they can completely revolutionize the perception of the product itself, defining new working methods and processes.

The service creates a greater bond between supplier and customer, often transforming the relationship into a partnership.
What is valid between you and your customers, it also valid between you and your suppliers!

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