Interviews and synthesis

The interviews of the research were semi-structured that took place between

10.1.2022-14.1.2022. The four (4) interviews were hosted by the researcher and rec-orded to ensure possibility to go through the material after the interview. The recording made the atmosphere of the interview more relaxed, and the nature of the interview was more like themed conversation amongst two colleagues than a structured inter-view. This enabled open minded answers and possibility to gain some hidden infor-mation that could be utilized effectively on the analysis of this research. The template of the interviews can be found from the appendix A.

Expert 1 – 10.1.2022

The first interviewee stated that he has quite good overview picture of the case com-pany’s offering and that he is directly and indirectly in touch with the customers of the case company. He is specialised on the maintenance and warranty cases related to the products that the case company is offering. Besides that, he also operates the demo machines at case company’s facilities and provides part manufacturing service.

From his perspective the case company has key knowledge on the manufacturing tech-nology that the case company’s products are using, knowhow on how to utilize this technology on different applications as well as knowhow of product optimization ac-cording to the limitations and benefits of the manufacturing technology. One of key as-pects being the ability to recognize how the customer could benefit from having a prod-uct and services from the case company. Other internal knowledge points he men-tioned were the knowhow on material science, software development and the general problem-solving knowledge that the case company has in his opinion.

Regarding the current services the case company is offering, he highlighted:

• Basic services such as: warranty, spare- and consumable parts offerings, Deliv-ery service.

• Intermediate services such as: user trainings, yearly maintenance services, ma-chine deployment services and online support services.

• Advanced services such as: process monitoring system software service and service agreements for direct customers.

He highlighted that the services are mainly provided as addons and that the core offer-ing is built around the product rather than services. Therefore, he also found it a bit harder to list out advanced services or other aspects that could be more value adding than just regular product support and deployment. He stated that the current service of-fering has mainly been built based on reacting on the customers feedback rather than strategic development. Therefore, he would like to highlight the need of knowing the needs of customers in advance so that the services could be built in advance and ac-cording to the need. The current services pointed out are mainly tangible so, the level of digitization is low. The only service that he considered to be utilizing digitization be-sides software’s is the online training service that has been offered due to the pan-demic and traveling restriction. As a biggest challenge for digitization, he states to be the maturity of the industry and through it the use cases of their product being mainly focused on research and development. Even though he still highlights that there is a

definite need for online training services after the pandemic as well and points out that they should utilize the potential of digital tools as a data sharing and customer training platform.

He considers the organization of the case company to be non-structured and highly flexible. Therefore, the company is capable of allocating resources to where needed with short notice. He sees that the business model of the case company is built around their superior product and the value it brings with it to their end customers. Through comprehensive distributor network this product is provided to the end users with honest and transparent marketing that he sees being one of the cornerstones of the business model of the case company. He sees that the current organization is flexible enough and suitable for comprehensive service offering but highlights that for more customer-based service solutions the case company needs more resources than they have cur-rently.

Expert 2 – 11.1.2022

The second interviewees responsibility in the case company is to research and develop different mechanical solutions for the case company’s product offering, support the customer service and find innovative solutions for the upgrading the machine fleet that has been already installed on the market. On his daily work he is indirectly influencing the customer base of the case company through different solutions for active cases or through addons for existing products.

He stated that the key knowledge that the case company has in-house is focused on the utilizing the manufacturing technology of their products in a way that it is beneficial for their customers. Combining that to the cross-field knowledge of different hard sci-ences and technologies that the employees of the case company have, provides good base for recognizing possibilities for case company’s technology at customers prem-ises. This reflects also to the open-minded attitude for new possibilities that he states to be one of the key competitive advantages of the case company.

The current services of the case company that he listed out were like the ones that the technical specialist listed out. On top of that he highlighted some basic services such as tools, consumable parts and basic guidance, intermediate services such as software updates, comprehensive guidance documents and local support through distributors.

Outside these general group of services, he also highlighted that the case company provides right contacts for their customers for raw material supply, material knowhow and third-party accessories that might be helpful for the users of the machines. After he

listed his thoughts on the current services, he stated that they have been mainly devel-oped through demand and a must, rather than out of strategic decisions. He highlighted that some of the services have originally been on the table earlier but have not been contemplated prior to the actual need of the service.

Digitization of the service is at quite modest level according to him, but he states that it is being used on daily basis on some of the services such as warranty case ticketing system. He sees that the biggest challenge of the digitization of services is the lack of knowledge what kind of services would be needed which is related to the maturity of the whole industry where the case company operates.

The current business model of the case company is quite traditional OEM business model according to him. Cost structure is heavily based on the expenses of manufac-turing the equipment and revenue streams are mainly based on the sales of the manu-factured equipment. What he sees as main difference is the potential of the key re-sources that could flexible be utilized in service offering through their knowledge and the easily modifiable structure of the case company’s organization.

Expert 3 – 12.1.2022

The third interviewees responsibilities in the case company vary between different op-erations of governance and basic tasks of product designing. He considers himself to be more on the research and development side than on the operative side. Therefore, his influence on the customer base is more indirect and through intuitive solutions he comes up with his designs. He is also influencing the decision makers through his pres-ence on different events and through that is in direct touch with some of the customers.

The key knowhow of the case company according to him is around the technology that their products utilize, and he highlights that the knowledge is deep enough so that they can adapt the technology according to the demand that their customers indicate. Ac-cording to him this means that the case company also has supportive knowledge such as material knowledge, designing knowledge and knowhow about hard sciences. On top of that he says that the case company has also capabilities of helping their custom-ers to learn and realize how they could utilize manufacturing methods that the ma-chines of the case company enable. These aspects of deep knowledge reflect to the honesty of the case company that has been proven to provide customer satisfaction and increase in sales according to him.

The list of services he mentioned followed the same pattern as the previous interview-ees. But on top of those services, he also mentioned the pre-sale operations such as product manufacturing evaluation, which is something that the case company does, but

is not listed as an official service. Based on these services he places the case com-pany on goods-to-services continuum somewhere between full product comcom-pany and product service hybrid company. By this he means that the case company is mainly fo-cused on their products but support them with modest amount of addon services.

The services that the case company has, have been developed through the learning process of the customer demand. This has happened mainly due to the maturity of the whole industry since there is not yet that much of an industry standard for services.

Therefore, the case company has been somewhat of a pioneer for service creation ac-cording to him. The interest towards services that the case company has, has been in-dicated through strategy, but the true development of the services has been purely re-active work through indications from the customer field. As a biggest challenge for fu-ture service development, he states that besides lack of resources, the internal knowledge sharing for new employees at needed level might become a bottle neck.

The basis for this statement is in the complexity of the knowledge that the employees need to obtain to be able to provide advanced services effectively to the customers of the case company.

Even though the case company has some services that utilize digitization, he states that they could have noticeably higher level of utilization, since the digitized services can provide opportunities of more effective resource allocation and with it the deep knowledge could be used more effectively to service operations. As the biggest chal-lenge of digitization, he sees that there might not be suitable way for knowledge shar-ing with sufficient methods and therefore, he thinks that the shift towards more digitized service portfolio requires larger investigation and comprehensive projects.

The business model of the case company is based distribution of in-house built quality machines through a global network of partners that provide local service for their cus-tomers. Partners of the case company are supported through comprehensive trainings held by the case company and case specific guidance made available through partner portal platform. By placing these elements to the business model canvas, he came to quite similar conclusion as the mechanical designer. He describes the structure of the organization as flat and non-hierarchical, the biggest benefit of such organization ac-cording to him is the flexibility to allocate resources where and when needed. The downside of it is the lack of effectiveness in some situations since, the organization is missing clear guidelines and management with its current structure. Therefore, he sees that the current structure is not suitable for advanced service offering and would see a need of re-modelling.

Expert 4 – 14.1.2022

The fourth and the last interviewee described that his influence on the customer base of the case company is quite noticeable and important. Therefore, he has first-hand ex-perience on the aspects of offering that are effective and valued by the customers. He has also good overview also on the organization’s behaviours and its development over time.

The aspect that he states to be the key knowhow of the case company is the knowledge of how to turn the gained experience into realisation and through it to a product or a service that makes sense commercially. He mentions that this reflects onto the current products and services of the company that have been developed purely based on the experience and knowledge gained from the customer field rather than developing something that might have a demand and is theoretically accurate.

Other fields of knowledge that the case company has are mainly supportive knowledge such as different engineering knowledge, customer service knowledge and knowledge of material science. He considers that the amount of gained experience that the case company has, has given competitive advance. On top of that the highlights that the case company has a unique talent of being extremely eager to learn and gain addi-tional knowledge which feeds this pipeline of product and service development.

The current services of the case company are product supportive addons that are mainly tangible and quite traditional according to him. The few exceptions that he points out are research co-operation through part production service and online training service. He highlights that most of the aspects that could be considered as a service are provided as good will and are not creating any direct revenue for the case com-pany. Through these thoughts he considers the case company to be quite traditional product company and still heavily on the product-oriented side of the goods-to-services continuum. The digitization is not utilized as much as it should in the case company’s service offering according to the interviewee. He states that some of the services are benefiting from digitization indirectly through online information sharing, but mainly the services are tangible and traditional. Therefore, he sees a lot of opportunities on the digitization of services.

The structure of the organization in the case company is a semi-structured and non-hi-erarchical structure that relies on the expertise of each employee. Each employee has its own field of expertise, but the most effective and valuable work is done when the key expertise of each employee is utilized in single projects that are done jointly.

Therefore, the structure of the organization on a basic operation is quite flat but on

these joint projects the organization works as a hive according to him. This provides flexibility to some extent but has also become a known practise so the interviewee highlights that the structure could not be fully re-modelled to a traditional top-down hier-archy without massive challenges. He was confident that the current structure would be sufficient for some increase on service offering, but for more comprehensive service solution offering, the services would need to be scalable through digitization to be able to maintain current structure and way of operating.

Synthesis

The four interviewees had all a bit different role in the company and different back-grounds. This gave some variance to some of the answers, but also increased the va-lidity of the answers that were similar regardless of the interviewee. The roles of the in-terviewees and their influence over the customer base of the case company is pre-sented in the table 2 below.

Table 2. Interviewee's influence over customer base of the case company

Interviewee Role Influence on cus-tomer base

Regardless of the differences of the customer base influence, the answers of all inter-viewees were quite similar on the current service offering, business model and the structure of the company’s organization. Also, the way that the interviewees saw the key knowhow of the case company was quite similar amongst them. The main differ-ence on results were when the interviewees presented other aspects of internal knowledge, flexibility of the organizations structure and the bottlenecks of service de-velopment. Interviewees also had different opinions on the utilization of the digitization and how it could be utilized in the future service development. There were also differ-ences on the way interviewees saw the current service offering. As an example, the ex-pert 1 stated that some of the services that the case company provides are customer oriented and value adding services that are not directly linked to the main product of

the case company. Therefore, he positions the case company further up on the goods to services continuum that the other interviewees did.