The joint project is executed by the working group Industrial Services at the university of Bremen and the encoway GmbH. The WFB Wirtschaftsförderung Bremen and the city of Bremen support the project with funding. In addition, the project receives additional funding from the encoway GmbH.
The megatrend of individualization forces companies to provide products and services tailored for one individual customer in several markets. However, for the companies to remain competitive in the long term, they are also forced to standardize their intern processes for the purpose of the cost reduction. This leads to several conflicts of interests between the provider and the customer. With this background, the concept of modularization offers a potential solution for a wide market coverage through a sufficiently high number of product varieties without additional investments. The design principle of modularization is characterized by separating a complex product in several sub-products (modules). Those modules can be developed and substituted independently, without altering the system.
Up to now, the modularization principle is used mainly in the development of products and in the software development, partly because it is easy to visualize and implicate the concept of the modularity in those areas. In this context, the market for the appropriate consulting services and supporting systems has developed in this past 20 years. Today those systems are quite popular in the industry and are called CPQ-Systems (Configuration – Pricing – Quotation – Systems).
Similarly, companies from different service industries are facing equal challenges of satisfying individual customer demands efficiently. Service providers will also face the conflict between cost-efficient (service-) modular sets and a mass of market sided (service) varieties, in order to meet the strategic and individual requirements of the customer. Today, the service industry is at the beginning of that development and so far only a few service providers were able to modularize their portfolio appropriately.
The joint project “BakerStreet” is promoted by the Wirtschaftsförderung Bremen (WFB). The project deals with the upper mentioned challenges and develops suitable answers to the questions of individualization and modularization in several service industries Therefore, the differences between product modularization and service modularization are going to be examined. Special attention will be given to how the concept of modularity can be used to improve the sales process, in particular using the CPQ systems. The project deals with the following tasks:
Improvement of the existing methods and procedures. The goal of the project is the identification of methods and procedures for modularization and individualization of service portfolios for the practical implication through service providers. Based on the successful strategies of manufacturing companies and conceptual ideas from the service research, the process of generating modular services with configurable elements should be examined. As a result of this examination, cost reduction and turnover increase for service provider is expected. The methods and procedures are going to be summarized in a guideline and they are going to be easily accessible for practitioners.
Development of implementation strategies and tools. An additional project goal is the utilization of the identified and developed methods for the practical use. The methods are going to be tested using existing CPQ-systems with the partners from the logistics and wind energy sectors.
