Servitization Visioning: How to create an illustrative vision for a manufacturing organisation seeking to compete through services

Services present a compelling opportunity for manufacturers to improve growth and sustainability, but bringing about the organisational changes necessary to realise this is fraught with difficulties. The task of winning over the hearts and minds of stakeholders from across the business is especially challenging. Here, a clear expression of a vision for the future can be immensely powerful, providing a platform for effective communication and debate, and helping to promote alignment in management decisions.

Understanding the concepts of vision and mission, and how to create and represent a vision for a manufacturer engaging with servitization, is the topic of our latest mini-guide.

A vision can be expressed as either a statement or an illustration. Vision statements are usually succinct sentences or paragraphs, while illustrations are often richer, more explanatory and more powerful. However, care is needed to avoid creating a vision which inadvertently embeds a ‘goods based logic’ and in doing so inhibits the ambition of a vision for services.

In this mini-guide, we adopt a business model framework which is product and service agnostic, and use this as the basis for a ‘services vision template’. This template can be populated by executives to support building consensus (helping to debate and explain possible futures) and governance (representing a desired future state).