Industrial service excellence in manufacturing companies: a neo-configurational perspective

There is a trend among manufacturing companies to augment their product offering with services due to competitive and economic reasons as well as changing customer demand. However, offering services is often a challenging task for manufacturing companies, as their core capabilities are in the manufacturing business. Therefore, this paper tries to identify which aspects are important to offer excellent industrial services and therefore constitute industrial service excellence. The results of our research based on literature and interviews with 26 managers from manufacturing companies in Austria and Bavaria show that there are five dimensions: high service quality, competitiveness of the services, economic efficiency, flexibility and internal service involvement. We use fuzzy set Qualitative Comparative Analysis within a sample of 242 manufacturing companies in Austria and Bavaria to analyze the configurations of the dimensions of industrial service excellence and sales force capabilities as well as firm size and importance of services that lead to financial performance of the service business, nonfinancial performance of the service business as well as enabler for the product business. We show that there are equifinal configurations that lead to performance and that these configurations depend on the contingency factors of firm size and importance of services. The dimensions of industrial service excellence are interdependent, as shown in the various configurations. As the configurations leading to the three performance dimensions are different, companies have to decide what their aim of servitization is in order find the configuration that supports their aim.