Case Study: Challenges of Transition from a Manufacturing Company to a Maintenance Partner

The paper discusses the new aspects of services and product lifecycle management could bring to the manufacturing company presented in this paper as a case study. The paper starts with a literature review and continues on to the case study. In the discussion section the findings are presented, following a conclusion section, where plausible miniature scenarios for circling the problems found earlier are presented. The service orientation is discussed through product lifecycle management aspect. The main topics discuss about the practical problems that came forth during the research. Many of those could have been avoided if the possibility of service orientation had been taken into account earlier. Companies need to seek new ways for creating profit and differentiate among the competition. Differentiating through services is seen as a favorable decision, although the implementation might not be as straightforward. Adding services to a core product creates more opportunities for a customer, but also enhances the company´s position in the markets. The goal of this research is to give insight to the challenges that a modern manufacturing company faces when in transition. Practical problems, intra- and extra-company are presented with discussion, results and suggested outcome.