Service Development in Heavy Equipment Industry

To stay competitive in today‟s complex market, companies need to find innovative business strategies to increase their market share or profitability. For this purpose, many companies have now started to shift their business focus from only designing tangible products into more comprehensive products and services designs. In this sense, the emerging importance of innovative service development becomes more apparent. Much research has been undertaken to develop methodologies or tools for developing and managing services. However, only limited interest has been given to the issue of service development in the heavy equipment industry. Heavy equipment is equipment that is capital-intensive, heavy, difficult to transport, has a longer life cycle and is technologically more complex and requires more intensive maintenance. This equipment utilized by many industries such as mining, construction, forestry, agriculture, and transportation. In these industries, heavy equipment requires high investment, thus, achieving an optimum return on assets (ROA) and capital velocity is of great importance. For this purpose, the provision of innovative services is very important for ensuring higher levels of asset availability and performance within acceptable cost. This paper aims to investigate innovative services development for the heavy equipment industry especially for mining industries. This incorporates issues such as service types and service levels. The investigation is based on an extensive literature review and a qualitative research approach which uses interview techniques. Three types of services are evaluated (i.e. product-oriented services, use-oriented services, and result oriented services). The initial research‟s results show that the most acceptable type of services is product-oriented services