Fraunhofer IAO - Service and Human Resources Management

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Service and Human Resources Management

Fraunhofer Institute for Industrial Engineering IAO

Contact

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
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© Fraunhofer IAO

Service and Human Resources Management
Services
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Research
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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
(Design of interaction work, age and diversity management, corporate culture that promotes innovation)
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:

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.

Back in the 1990s, our experts helped develop a holistic assessment process for services under the name of »ServAs«. We have meanwhile accumulated extensive experience in analyzing complete service organizations. As our processes are built on a modular basis, the analysis can also be tailored to individual subsegments as required.

»InnoScore Service« was developed specifically for services associated with manufacturing companies. This benchmarking tool assesses the innovation capabilities existing within service activities and provides a direct comparison with companies from the same industry.

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.

By specifying service levels, we help companies sustainably manage the quality level of their services. In most companies the services offered will have evolved over time. Often there are no clearly detailed descriptions, let alone a clear structural overview of the services on offer. We help companies make their service portfolio transparent, put services into a uniform structure and highlight mutual dependencies.

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.

So much for the theory. In practice, however, designing a concerted, end-to-end process structure involving direct customer contact often proves difficult. We offer businesses a detailed analysis of customer-related processes. The necessary transparency is created by recording workflows in order to identify weaknesses in organization and staff-related questions – such as interface problems, duplicated processes, long lead times or the need for training – while pinpointing where action is needed. We sit down with the client, design and help the company implement an action plan.

Our market study of business process management tools – which was last conducted in 2008 – provides a detailed overview of the latest software tools. This knowledge enables us to provide companies with comprehensive advice in selecting the most suitable process management software.

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

Companies do however face a host of operational issues when translating these ideas into marketable solutions and integrating them into a viable business model: they need to know which specific steps are required. Consequently, it must be clear from the outset which specific tasks need to be completed in the development phase and which tools are available.

Fraunhofer IAO established the »Service Engineering« discipline in the 1990s to address these issues. We have built up extensive know-how on the back of numerous research and consulting projects, providing our customers with access to a wide range of methods, approaches and tools to develop innovative new services.

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.

The systematic recording and ongoing promotion of individual and group-related staff competences has proven a reliable tool in helping consistently meet this aim. The CM ProWork software tool, which was developed specifically to analyze and evaluate decision-making competence in the field of industrial/manufacturing activities, is used to integrate all the production areas and, in particular, the target group of workers into the competence development strategies adopted by the company as a whole.

CM ProWork enables staff competences acquired in a work environment to be displayed on a task and process-specific basis. The multilingual design supports cross-business as well as international comparisons, enabling competence bottlenecks among workers, which could limit process stability and staff deployment flexibility, to be identified early on. Setting up this kind of systematic competence management also helps businesses rise to the challenges associated with the increasing integration of production workflows in transnational value-creation processes.

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.

The consequences for workforce performance associated with future demographic shifts need to be analyzed to integrate the necessary measures into the corporate strategy in good time. Thus we need to know the extent to which performance is impaired, say in terms of organizational productivity and flexibility, and what measures are available to prevent developments from moving in the wrong direction.

By evaluating the development of the age structure we help companies identify key problem areas, assess the short, medium and long-term need for action and integrate these areas into a future-proof development strategy that is tailored to the individual business.

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

Human Resources Management
Fraunhofer IAO
- Phone +49 711 970-2020
Thomas Burger

New Service Development
Fraunhofer IAO
- Diese E-Mail-Adresse ist gegen Spambots geschützt! Sie müssen JavaScript aktivieren, damit Sie sie sehen können.
- 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.

And no less so than in the area of enterprise-related and hybrid services, which make a major contribution to growth. Research and development in the service environment help businesses tap into this growth potential – enabling them to do so on a par with the levels consistently seen by the industrial manufacturing sector in Germany.

If Germany is to develop over the next few years into a nation worthy of international acclaim for excellent services and outstanding service research, industry, science and government need to be networked more closely, international trends assimilated, and the goal of market and opinion leadership pursued in new solution or thematic areas. The MARS service project, launched in summer 2006 with a five-year term, aims to do precisely that. The project includes conducting comprehensive surveys within the expert panel in 2007 and 2009. Depending on the results garnered from the individual topic areas, in-depth analyses will also be carried out, with input from an extended competence network.

Client

German federal ministry of education and research

www.service-monitoring.eu

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.

The international marketing of services holds out enormous potential, with the globalized economy offering opportunities to those businesses in particular that can provide innovative and high-quality global services – in conjunction with products or as standalone solutions.

The »Services Made in Germany« research project was launched to promote the development and management of international services. The research project, which forms part of the Eureka project, aims to come up with scientific/methodology principles to internationalize technical services. Along the same lines as a high-quality product, a high-quality service must also be fine-tuned constantly to customer requirements, market circumstances, profitability considerations and technological developments. With this in mind, the project partners are developing holistic concepts and tools so that services from Germany can in future also be successful in the global marketplace.

Client

German federal ministry of education and research

www.services-made-in-germany.de

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).

With sites often dotted around the globe, the services sector can provide the company access to major earnings potential – potential that has all too often not been consistently exploited in the past. Small and mid-sized manufacturers in the mechanical and plant engineering sector in particular often cannot offer a »service from a single source«. The (external) dealer or branch office networks used as a ‘substitute’ in the past are however not always a compelling option when it comes to training, knowledge transfer or quality assurance.

In the ideal scenario it should make no difference to a company whether the manufacturer or a dealer provides a good, reliable service. The SERAPHIM joint project developed and set up a platform and digital services to enable SMEs from the capital goods industry to integrate their external dealers more effectively. Organizational, personnel and economic issues are being analyzed alongside technical issues. The research partners likewise develop innovative business models and service concepts for manufacturers, dealers and customers in the area of service and sales.

Client

German federal ministry of economics and technology (BMWi)

Project partners

Infoman AG
KOCH Pac-Systeme GmbH
Laempe & Mössner GmbH
Schwäbische Werkzeugmaschinen GmbH

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.

The PRIDE research project, which has been up and running since 2008, examines the interaction between value creation, respect, pride and innovation, and how these can be influenced positively.

The project funded by the German federal ministry of education and research, the European Social Fund for Germany and the European Union, is developing methods which will measure and communicate the contribution of services to value creation. Suitable measures should in future also provide employees with a firm basis to asses their own worth when dealing with new tasks outside of their professional profile and with no corresponding innate value. However, the analysis not only examines how »producer pride« can be promoted but also how to effectively combat the downside of an overinflated sense of pride.

Client

German federal ministry of education and research
European Social Fund for Germany, European Union

www.pride-online.de

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.

As part of an initiative to identify training needs early on, the FreQueNz research network looks at emerging training requirements and assesses them with a view to their future development.

The initiative coordinated by the Fraunhofer IAO aims to identify future training developments, devise potential responses and come up with research findings as the foundation for the future-proof structure of vocational training.

Client

German federal ministry of education and research

www.frequenz.net

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.

An HR policy that is forward-looking and in tune with demographic changes will only be possible by integrating life-long learning into the operational system and identifying future training and competence bottlenecks early on.

The task of competence management is thus to record and describe staff competences, while also ensuring competences are optimally utilized and further developed in relation to strategic corporate objectives. As part of the LEONARDO DA VINCI »CM ProWork transfer« project (Competence Management Production Work) coordinated by the Fraunhofer IAO, a software tool has been developed that specifically illustrates the competences utilized by staff in their production work activities.

Operational competence management can also be supported seamlessly beyond the confines of individual business units and countries by systematically recording data using the multilingual software tool. This helps promote individual and group-related competences in a more targeted fashion, ensuring that factors such as productivity, quality or flexibility remain competitive, and enabling businesses to respond to the innovation requirements of each individual market.

Client

European Union

www.cmprowork.eu

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.

So they can meet customer requirements to the best of their ability, their knowledge and skills must be on a par with the state of the art. This will ensure they can independently provide the services – services which are becoming increasingly complex – associated with the product »machinery« and complete the work as quickly as possible.

A collaborative on-demand learning system will enable service engineers to fully utilize training courses even when they are off-site. The ‘eColleagues’ project funded by the German federal ministry of education and research aims to develop prototypes for this kind of on-demand learning system, and implement and test the system as a practical application. As part of the development of the learning system in particular, use is made of sources of implied knowledge which already exist within the company but have not yet been utilized, or not yet utilized sufficiently for the targeted training of service engineers.

Client

German federal ministry of education and research

Project partners

Homag AG
Oerlikon Textile GmbH & Co KG
Infoman AG

www.ecolleagues.de

Teams

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

Human Resources Management

The integrated development of structures, processes and human resources is the most effective way of ensuring the efficient interplay of organization, human resources and technology within a company. The solutions devised in the Human Resources Management Competence Center therefore always take account of the close intermeshing between human resources and organizational development. These solutions are also based on a thorough analysis of change processes as part of work.

Service by and large entails interaction and emotive work. Whether it is face-to-face or conveyed using state-of-the-art I&C systems, such work requires a highly motivated, competent workforce. We consequently also analyze the interaction processes and help shape them as we set about developing new services.

Concepts for age and diversity management, methods and approaches to developing a management and corporate culture that promotes innovation, as well as the design of new forms of work and technology adaption are just some of the current key areas of the Competence Center Human Resources Management.

Human Resources Management Competence Center

Competence Management

Technology change and, in turn, the development of the work organization, coupled with the increasing average age among staff and bottlenecks affecting young specialist staff turn forward-looking competence development within the enterprise into an important future task. For this reason, the optimum utilization of staff by leveraging existing training as well as the structuring of individual further development options through challenging activities and career paths that promote learning lie at the heart of the implementation concepts put together by the Competence Team. The aim is to identify new quality requirements early on and develop ways of ensuring these are met. To this end, the Fraunhofer IAO is developing efficient learning formats and creating organizational concepts which can be used to structure the work formats in a way that promotes motivation and learning.

The Competence Team’s research activities and implementation projects cover all levels of competence development: we devise concepts and methods for competence management as a whole in order to maintain along strategic lines the competences brought together within the business. And we are developing practical answers – answers customized to the company – to specific questions, such as the early identification of staff training needs. As part of skills development we implement innovative concepts in the field of further training and work-related learning. Here, digital learning and collaborative applications are tested, evaluated and implemented as part of company-specific deployment concepts.

Competence Management Competence Team

Service Management

The assignments undertaken in service management comprise the customer-oriented design of services along with the analysis and optimization of service processes.

Issues such as the standardization and modularization of service components and the internationalization of services, or the implementation of service concepts with service-oriented architectures also figure large.

The work of the Competence Team Service Management is geared to the lifecycle of services and hybrid products.

Both cross-functional and phase-specific issues are addressed.

These include the:

-		Development of service strategies for manufacturing companies,
-		Standardization and modularization of service portfolios,
-		Design, analysis and optimization of service processes,
-		Design, analysis and optimization of sales structures with service providers,
-		Development of organizational solutions for the successful export of services,
-		Rollout of performance systems to control service productivity.

Innovative issues in service management can only be tackled through collaboration between various specialist disciplines. Collaboration with colleagues from the fields of service development and service work, as well as an international network of research institutes, also enables highly innovative issues to be tackled by drawing on the necessary expertise.

Service Management Competence Team

New Service Development

Do entirely different laws govern the world of services when compared with the world of products? Are successful new services the result of a random »flash of inspiration« or can they be »invented« to schedule? The Competence Team New Service Development offers practical answers to questions like these. The specialist discipline »Service Engineering« was set up to do just that, and is now acknowledged and in great demand around the world. Based on the theory that the service sector can learn from classic product development when it comes to its own development, systematic methods are being rolled out to bring new services to market or to structure existing services more efficiently and in line with customer needs. »Soft factors« such as the interaction between service provider and customer play an important role in this respect. The future-oriented work of the Competence Team will also look at the modeling and simulation of services as well as the prototyping of new service offerings.

The portfolio of the Competence Team New Service Development includes the following services:

-		Design of development processes for services,
-		Identification of new services and creation of business plans,
-		Determination of requirements placed on new services,
-		Visualization and testing of service concepts,
-		Definition of service levels,
-		Design of service processes,
-		Design of customer/staff interaction,
-		Support for the market launch of new services.

New Service Development Competence Team

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