service provision in knowledge-based industries – a global study on the服务提供以知识为基础的行业,一个全球性的研究.pdfVIP

J. Service Science Management, 2010, 3: 138-142 doi:10.4236/jssm.2010.31017 Published Online March 2010 (http://www.SciRP.org/journal/jssm) Service Provision in Knowledge-Based Industries – A Global Study on the Tooling Industry Günther Schuh, Wolfgang Boos, Fabian Gaus Laboratory for Machine Tools and Production Engineering (WZL), RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany. Email: {g.schuh, w.boos, f.gaus}@wzl.rwth-aachen.de Received October 2nd, 2009; revised November 15th, 2009; accepted December 24th, 2009. ABSTRACT In today’s times, more than ever cost competition and high demands of globalized value-adding chains put strong pres- sure on small- and medium-sized toolmakers. As an exclusive differentiation in price is not an option, new means for achieving sustainable competitive positions have to be found. A promising approach for differentiation is to enhance the existing range of products by offering customer-specific services within so-called industrial product-service-systems. However, the lack of local presence inhibits the toolmakers’ abilities to deliver these services to their global customers. To address these challenges the European RD-project TIPSS has the objecti ve to develop suitable methods, tech- niques and technologies, for toolmakers to improve their local and global performance thus enabling them to offer in- dustrial product-service-systems on a global scale. The basis of the project is a large scale toolmaker and parts pro- ducer survey focusing on service provision. The survey identifies the global footprint of toolmakers regarding the pro- vision of tool-related services. Key findings of the survey with respect to designing industrial product-service-systems are presented in this paper. Keywords : Production Engineering, Product-Service-Systems, Tool Die Making 1. Introduction In order to develop IPS2 that truly