Can You Get Your Service Providers To Automate: A Framework For Corporations

I was shocked for a second.

The panellist said he wanted his service providers to automate. Surely a company (lets call them BigCo) would be chasing the lowest cost for their service contracts (provided by CleanCo), not the most automated. His rationale quickly became clear, more automation implies lower risk of injury in a catastrophe.

But how can BigCo get CleanCo to automate?

The book "Thinking In Services" by Majid Iqbal provides a framework for designing services

Lets attempt to use this framework to design an "automated site walkway cleaning" service between BigCo and CleanCo. Majid breaks services into two fundamental components.

Performances: activities that the service delivers. In this case it the action of cleaning a walkway.

Affordances: resources that are used and provided as part of the delivery of the service in time. In this case its a cleaning robot.

But what if CleanCo does not have access to a cleaning robot!

Does it make sense for BigCo to provide the cleaning robot?

No, its unlikely to be cost effective.

BigCo does have an R&D department but their core skills are not focused on cleaning. They will probably not be very good at designing cleaning robots. A better strategy would be for BigCo to invest in a few robotic startups that could niche into building a cleaning robot that CleanCo could use.

BigCo would gain financially from the ecosystems growth while lowering its cleaning costs and reducing its risk profile through an automated cleaning service.