Mapping the future of S Business: Benchmarking Today’s Footprints

Rationale

The AFSMI has been benchmarking the High Tech Service Industry since the beginning of the nineties to understand how these companies are coping with their day-to-day situation while also having to consider the necessary global perspective.

The environment service businesses are in today is very unstable and the conditions are changing continually and dramatically. This situation has caused service executives to ask how others in the industry are coping with these changes, in particular the transition to S Business (The Services Solutions Business). The other key concern has been to better understand the measures that are now required to affect behaviour and monitor the business. The timeframe of their concern is the next 2 to 3 years and their desire to increase their operational efficiency while delivering better levels of customer service.

The purpose of this benchmark is to provide these companies with comparative levels of performance, trends and insights into the changes necessary to effectively make the transition to an S Business environment.

Scope

The scope of Benchmarking and Future Trends V addresses three categories of the service sectors, all of which are experiencing global change and competitive pressures:

IT Medical Document Management

The Benchmark involves those people perceived as accredited thought leaders in industry across these sectors and has been produced in close collaboration from within the service organisations of 20 of the top 100 businesses in the world.

The measures used and the focus of the Benchmark indicates the reaction of these businesses to the developing environment of service and how these though leaders are adapting their businesses to survive and thrive.

The results in the body of the report provide a clear benchmark of best practice, for businesses to compare their performance and find examples of superior performance, and to understand the processes and practices driving that performance. Companies can then improve their performance by tailoring and incorporating these best practices into their own operations - not by imitating, but by innovating.

During interviews with the participants they identified the Future Trends that they felt would have the most impact over the next three years. These are studied in detail in the report but are listed here to provide an insight into the areas considered important. The list of trends is in the order of priority established by the participants, in terms of the impact on their role and their business.

The participants all agreed that for service operations to continue to succeed they will require sophisticated tools and skilled managers, with effective processes and mechanisms in place. They will also have to deliver excellent, consistent service, effectively delivered and flexible enough to respond to the ever-changing environment and ever more demanding customers. Without these capabilities in place, businesses will fail to deliver either the breadth of services expected, or the quality of performance demanded.