Author: dsa_admin

We are extremely happy and thankful about the mention of Swiss Conference on Data Science 2019, SDS2019, at the news bulletin of Swiss Statistical Society (SSS). Representatives of SSS participated at the conference and also supported it as one of the community sponsors, like previous years. We are happy about this long relationship with them and hope that we continue collaborating. 

Find the SDS2019 article here (page 19), http://stat.ch/images/bulletin/pdfs/bulletin_93.pdf. 

The author of this post, Paolo Mauri, was invited as a speaker at the recently held “Smart Services” Expert Group event. Following are his findings which he shared during his talk.

1. What was the Challenge?

In today’s globalized world, customers expect optimum performance and optimum service, wherever they are and around the clock (24/7). A number of players stretch their operations across countries and continents, and expect to find the same service level wherever they are. It is particularly challenging to meet the request on a globally distributed installed base that comprises a wide variety of products and several product generations in three different product lines (food, beverage, and laundry). Additionally, the service must scale in a cost-efficient manner. This creates the challenge of either generating additional revenue by services or creating a highly automated service that scales at very low incremental costs.

2. By which Service-oriented Approach did we Solve it?

Electrolux Professional decided to bundle the services in the concept “Essentia”, the service product. This allows to offer the same, systematic approach to the service offering across markets, distribution channels and products, thus transitioning the company from being product-oriented to solution-oriented instead. Recent acquisitions allow in the meantime to explore the “pay-per-X” market. 

IoT plays a pivotal role in this transformation, as connecting the installed base (which was already connectable to a large extent) to the dedicated service cloud enhances the services that can be offered flexibly to a variety of actors, from internal technicians to external users. Various channels and user interfaces are possible (e.g., apps, call center etc.). The services apply to technical support (e.g., remote condition monitoring and support) and also to support the customer in the optimization of their operations (usage, energy and detergent usage, etc.). We decided to co-create the function with the customers, keeping of course an eye on the scalability of the solutions brought to market. 

3. What are our learnings?

For what IoT solutions are concerned, we understood at a very early stage that customers need to be somehow guided in the process of finding out what their real needs are, and that customization has to be performed so that it remains scalable.

There is still a difficulty in finding the right price positioning of the connected services, especially when offering through indirect sales or service partners. The hospitality industry is moving rather slowly if compared with other ones, thus not offering an easy benchmarking.

Service networks have different level of digital maturity, so we need to make sure they grow their capabilities in order to ripe the most from connected machines. We decided to co-create the tools for them, rather than go for a top-down approach from central.

This will also help the service provider to change their business model from a merely reactive, to a proactive one.

Digitalisation has an impact on organisational areas such as strategy, products and services, investment volumes, personnel qualification, the recruitment of specialists and organisational structures, as well as on the corporate environment such as political, legal, infrastructural and competence-enhancing framework conditions. The project DigiNav developed a procedure for the systematic collection, analysis, prioritisation and implementation of digitisation potential in SMEs. The focus is on the economic benefit as well as the holistic contribution to business success.

The navigator can be downloaded here: http://bzi40.eu/de/publikationen/tags/arbeitswelt/298-nutzenbasierter-digitalisierungsnavigator-wie-kmu-ihre-digitalisierungsstrategie-selbst-entwickeln-koennen

Growing importance of services

The expert group «Smart Services» member ZHAW actively participated in this project by contributing chapter 3 «Service Transformation and Service Engineering». The economic importance of services is increasing. This is reflected in the continuous growth of the service sector (so-called tertiary sector), which accounts for a substantial share of economic performance and employment. The shift to services is being driven by saturated markets and intense competition. A need for service benefits can also be identified on the customer side: customer demand is developing in the direction of service agreements and output guarantees. Shifting the focus from products to services is therefore of central importance for manufacturing companies. With services, the locus of value creation shifts from the factory to the customer interaction, the design of which gains significantly more importance.

For manufacturing companies, the potential for additional sales exists on the basis of services. Suppliers are expanding their product business to include higher-margin services, which will also increase customer loyalty and loyalty. In addition, services based on the installed base generate more stable cash flows than new sales. In this chapter, we discuss this development and show concrete tools suitable for SMEs with which the transformation from product to service provider can be tackled.

Data is quickly becoming the most valuable asset in the insurance sector, given its tremendous volume in our digital era. Simultaneously, Artificial Intelligence (AI), harnessing big data and complex structures with Machine Learning (ML) and other methods, is becoming more powerful. Insurers expect more efficient processes, new product categories, more personalized pricing, and increasingly real-time service delivery and risk management from this development. Given the many leverage points in insurance, it surprises that AI-driven digitalization is not evolving even more rapidly.

This White Paper comprises a study among Swiss and German insurance players, tackling a key business problem: Legacy infrastructure, missing interoperability, and a lack of comprehensive knowledge about AI and its use cases hinder the adoption of advanced, AI-based, ethical insurance and risk schemes.

The 6^th meeting of the expert group “Blockchain Technology in Supply Chain Management” was split in two parts: The first part was member-only, whereas in the second part we invited the public.

In the first hour, we discussed on how to formalize all the precious learnings that we have gathered so far in our previous meetings, but also the members themselves in their companies. Most experts have done some kinds of Blockchain projects. We want to collect these insights in order to facilitate future projects. This will be done by compiling a common document which will be available for the members – at a later stage some parts will be made public. Additionally, students from the ZHAW will support the group with the exploration of use cases proposed by the members. This combination allows for an effective collaboration between the academia and industry.

In the second hour, the expert group opened up for guests and the session was hosted by our member Vitus Ammann from SBB. Vitus and his colleagues Barbara Möri and Marco Studer presented their solution for certificate management of their workforce – currently a tedious and a complicated process. As they are in the middle of the planning phase of their decentralized framework, Vitus asked the expert groups for feedback and additional ideas to manage the certificates. The experts split up into two workshops, where the first workshop elaborated on the technical aspects, and the second rather on the business case. In the end, the expert group could give Vitus and his colleagues a few very helpful hints on how to proceed and what details are important to consider.

We concluded the meeting with an apéro where further ideas were exchanged. All in all, the meeting was extremely interactive and the members walked away happily. But they also got some homework until the next meeting in September, where we would like to discuss our document full of learnings.

How to create service value by a digital twin? How to support business actors in their decision making along the product life-cycle using a digital twin?

The Expert Group “Smart Services” sheds light on these questions by the paper entitled “Service value creation using a digital twin” by Jürg Meierhofer and Shaun West. The presentation of the paper at the 10th year Naples Forum on Service by Jürg Meierhofer aroused lively interest and triggered interesting discussions.

The digital twin is conceptualized from the service perspective and how it can provide services that create value for a range of actors within the ecosystem. Given the concepts of service-dominant logic and service design, approaches are described for designing and delivering value to customers based on the digital twin. The technological concept of the digital twin is made up of the different layers of the twin and their contribution to value creation. The twin is structured in a layer for the component, the assembly, the machine, the shop floor / production line, the factory, and the business system. Each of these layers is characterized by specific modeling tools and data requirements and has a particular value contribution to services. Moreover, this value contribution can be assigned to different phases of the product life-cycle and to the actor who is the beneficiary of the services. Following the service-oriented approaches, value is created by linking the digital twin as a source of data to the relevant actors in the ecosystem at the appropriate time and translating the data into relevant information to support decision making.

Our 5th meeting of the expert group “Blockchain Technology in Supply Chain Management” took place in the vibrant Blockchain Hub Trust Square located in a wonderful building in the Bahnhofstrasse Zurich.

The first speech was given by Malik El Bay from the think tank Dezentrum (Trust Square resident) on a project in the food supply chain. The project was conducted together with Foodways and the University of Zurich and was supported by the BLW (Bundesamt für Landwirtschaft). The expert group discussed possible future research directions for sustainable supply chains proposed by Malik.

In the second part, Sacha Uhlmann, the Chief Product Officer of the famous Swiss startup modum, presented us some deep insights into modum seasoned with some personal anecdotes. Sacha showed us the transformation of modum: from the (over-) ambitious beginnings as a young startup to a mature and market-oriented company. Especially interesting were the comments of a participating expert from SAP, as they are partners from modum.

As always, the participants asked numerous questions which led to fascinating discussions. The apéro served as a continuation of these discussions and concluded our fifth expert group meeting.

We are looking forward to have more of these inspiring discussions in our sixth meeting in the beginning of July.