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Sales, installation and service of technical and industrial products can be quite profitable, with margins as high as 40% or more.  The opportunity is growing because companies are willing to pay a premium to service providers able to reduce their operating and compliance risk. 

The path to these profits lies in offering a wide range of products and services in many locations, so customers have a single source provider or “one throat to choke” as someone described in an interview for this report.  However, growth in people, offices, products handled and range of services offered — whether organic or through acquisition — creates tremendous complexity.  As a result, growing service companies often face real challenges to their efficiency and profitability.

Companies must find both economies of scale and economies of scope to prosper as they grow.  The foundation for this type of success is a set of coherent, fact-based business processes that span all departments.   If everyone works from the same set of data, there is an even stronger foundation to consistently meet customer expectations.  This ranges from good support to timely delivery of desired services to accurate invoices to opportunities for cross-selling and up-selling.

Profitable growth requires integrated business software designed specifically for the services industry. Sales and service organizations cannot expect to adequately support these processes with spreadsheets or disconnected systems.  Customer-facing service and sales capabilities must integrate with back-office inventory, billing and costing functions.  Software should support every technician, cost accountant, billing clerk, salesperson and inventory manager — not just “super-users.”

Historically, most offerings to manage services either came from:  

• point-solution vendors who specialized in scheduling field service technicians;
  
  
• ERP providers that simply added on service functionality to an already complex manufacturing-oriented system; or
  
  
• custom systems that are were expensive to maintain and provided limited growth potential. 

The concept of integrated Service business software is relatively new.  So finding a system that helps streamline all processes across the Service business can be a challenge.

Fortunately, there are a select few systems on the market today that not only incorporate all functions in a service business, but also accommodate growth.  The companies adopting these systems are gaining a competitive advantage in the market.  They can confidently make decisions that improve value to their customer while increasing their efficiency and improving the bottom line.