Decision support tools for measuring and controlling After-Sales service performance

Companies have progressively realised that complementing industrial goods with the provision of value added services can be an important lever to prosper on those markets affected by weak demand, hard competition and decreasing margins. Among the different forms of service provisions, After-Sales services have acquired a strategic role as a source of revenues and competitive advantage. This transition from products to services calls for the creation of expertise, structures and processes new to the product manufacturer. Companies need to mature the capability to design and deliver services rather than products and a fundamental requirement lies in designing specific and appropriate decision support tools to help companies in monitoring their current and future results and the critical trends of the beneath processes. Goal of this paper is to provide a procedure which allows to develop two decision support tools. A case study is proposed as a means to apply and validate the procedure.