Creating customer value through industrial services : case: Raute Technology Services

Abstract

The role of marketing can be seen as to assist the company on creating superior value for its customers, so that they would succeed against their competitors. Creating superior value has not always been essential, as in the past firms could achieve profitability due to regulated markets, controlled distribution channels or scarce resources. An increasing number of industrial manufacturing companies are moving from offering solely products to offering combinations of products and services. Customers benefit from industrial services as they support and enable the value generation of the products they have purchased. To firms, offering services is a matter of competitive advantage since services are harder to copy and easier to customize, due to their intangibility and heterogeneous nature.

This study aims at contributing to the research of value creation phenomenon in the business-to-business (B2B) markets, focus being in the industrial service markets. This is done through analyzing the case of Raute Technology Services. Raute is a Finnish technology company, which provides machinery, equipment and services for veneer, plywood and LVL (Laminated Veneer Lumber) producers. For this single case study, ten Raute employees, as well as ten of their customer companies, were interviewed about the themes surrounding value creation.

The objective of this study was to review the existing literature about value creation processes in the context of B2B markets, to discuss characteristics of industrial service markets in the value creation context and to study how Raute Technology Services and its customers currently identify the value creation processes and the customer value proposition of Raute Technology Services.