Home Business Areas Service and Human Resources Management

Service and Human Resources Management

Fraunhofer IAO

Contact

  • Walter Ganz M.A.


    Walter Ganz M.A.

    Head of Business Unit
    Service and
    Human Resources Management

    mehr

    Fraunhofer IAO
    Nobelstraße 12
    70569 Stuttgart, Germany

    • Phone +49 711 970-2180
© Fraunhofer IAO

Quality depends on people

For many years the quality of services on offer has been the decisive competitive factor, and not just in the service sector. The scope and structure of services has become a significant USP among manufacturing companies, too. Nonetheless, high-quality services do not evolve by accident. They have to be developed and managed professionally: company structures therefore need to be geared to efficiently supporting services, and capable of specifically leveraging the potential of individual staff.

Achieving the highest possible degree of "intelligent interaction" between the organization and human resources can be achieved only if the structures and processes, as well as staff know-how and commitment, are seen and developed as a unit. Two elements are therefore central to the research activities and practical projects undertaken by Service and Human Resources Management at the Fraunhofer IAO: the design of innovative, compelling work opportunities that promote learning, and the development of organizational and human resources skills.

Research focuses on the following topics:
  • Management of services
    (Service strategies, optimization of service processes and sales structures, management of service productivity)
  • Development of new services
    (Service engineering, business models for new services, testing service concepts, design of development processes)
  • Human resources management
    (Interaction Management, Service Work Transformation & Change Management, Service Culture, Age & Diversity Management, Integration of New Service Development and New Media
  • Competence management
    (Early identification of training needs, training concepts, digital learning and collaborative applications)

Service and Human Resources Management at the Fraunhofer IAO is one of the first ports of call for assignments relating to service topics in Germany. Our experts support companies with know-how and extensive practical services. We combine innovative approaches from research with methods that have been tried and tested over many years. Such credentials help us ensure the long-term viability and acceptance of individual reorganization and training measures.

Services

Our interdisciplinary project teams, made up of professional, experienced staff, ensure our clients receive holistic solutions »from a single source«. Each service package is tailored to individual company requirements: from analysis of the actual and target situation through concept development to accompanying quality assurance during implementation.

Core service modules include:

Interaction Management
More and more frequently, modern work is becoming “interaction work”. The efficiency and effectiveness of work processes increasingly depends on how employees communicate and interact with each other and with customers.

Service work transformation
Changes in business models, work processes and organisational structures are the main, ongoing tasks for companies.

Foresight, monitoring and trend analysis
Only those who can recognise future-oriented topics and predict future developments are in a position to make well-founded decisions that stand the test of time and offer convincing solutions.

Service Check
You need to clearly identify weaknesses and potential for improvement in order to accurately assess the services you offer and reliably evaluate their quality. Internal analyses and benchmarking the performance of your company against market competitors provides the requisite framework.

Product management for services
Deciding the scope of services in your own portfolio requires that you focus on customer expectations and on the cost-effectiveness of related measures.

Process management for services
Increased customer orientation is a core strategy component for most companies in Germany. This is essential if a business, be it an SME or a multinational, is to grasp and respond to market changes quickly and flexibly.

Development of new services
Good ideas underpin innovative services that help safeguard your own competitive position or even open up new fields of business.

Competence management in manufacturing activities
Manufacturing companies in particular face the ongoing task of maintaining productivity, quality and flexibility, while fulfilling the innovation requirements of markets with an eye squarely on the future.

Age Management
The average age of the existing corporate workforce is set to increase substantially over the next few years. Established strategies involving a balanced age mix will no longer work as they have done in the past.


Facilities

It is a matter of fact that companies rarely develop their new services in a systematic way and new concepts are not tested adequately. The result is that particularly cost-intensive improvement measures become necessary afterwards.

The Fraunhofer Institute for Industrial Engineering and its partners have therefore bundled their knowledge and experience into a unique »laboratory«. The ServLab offers solutions for various important objectives and tasks in the field of service, thereby facilitating an integrated analysis of people, technology and organization as well as the customer focus.

As a holistic platform, the ServLab is not only used to develop and design new and innovative services, but also offers a wide range of modern methods, techniques and technologies for testing, modelling and simulating these services in a realistic context. New services can, for instance, be visualized and tested using virtual reality, work organization measures and innovative interaction concepts can be developed as prototypes and learning enviroments can be created for company staff.


Contacts

  • Sibylle Hermann

    Sibylle Hermann

    Human Resources Management
    Fraunhofer IAO

    • Phone +49 711 970-2020
  • Thomas Burger

    Thomas Burger

    New Service Development
    Fraunhofer IAO

    • Phone +49 711 970-2185


Research

Research and consulting projects in the field of service and personnel management call for a clear focus on objectives and implementation. Our teams develop customer-oriented solutions using interdisciplinary working practices, and a consulting approach that involves continual input from the client’s management team and staff. Independent analyses and recommendations, as well as observing and complying with standards throughout all project phases, underpin this work.

Our projects are mainly carried out directly on behalf of industrial and service companies, sponsors such as the European Union, the German federal ministry of education and research (BMBF) or the state of Baden-Württemberg.

Selected reference projects:

International Monitoring of Activities and Research in Services (MARS)
Service expertise is increasingly becoming the decisive factor for a business to compete and survive in Germany.

Services Made in Germany
Germany is the export world champion – while this may hold true for products in numerous industry sectors, there is still a long way to go when it comes to services.

Service initiative for German manufacturing companies
The German goods-producing industry has a global footprint. Export ratios of well over 70 percent are clear testimony of this fact. However, the margins on machinery have shrunk over the past few years (substantially in some cases).

Servcare – cooperative service systems in healthcare management
Rare diseases present a previously neglected field of research for the future design of services in healthcare management.

Respect as a resource for innovation in services
Enhancing an awareness of the value of professional services to levels that favorably compare with those which generally exist for specialized industrial activities will notably increase the innovativeness of companies and, in turn, their position vis-à-vis the competition.

Early identification of training requirements
A high level of education and training is just as important for individual employment opportunities and business performance as it is for the economy and the labor market as a whole.

Management competence for competence management
In light of the imminent bottlenecks among skilled staff and the associated increase in the average age of the workforce, thorough, end-to-end competence development of staff is becoming increasingly important.

eColleagues
Service engineers are often engaged on assignments that take them around the globe for weeks on end while they commission, repair or carry out conversion and maintenance work on machinery at the customers’ production locations.


Teams

The Service and Human Resources Management business unit is organized in the following teams:

Human Resources Management
Competence Management
Service Management

New Service Development