Managing products for service providers
Service companies often sell runtime products with periodic billing – for example licenses, managed services or maintenance contracts. In contrast to manufacturing companies, it is more difficult for service providers to track how successful their products are. This is because what can be accomplished, simply put, by looking into the warehouse of a producer is somewhat more difficult to assess for service providers. Their products are often not visible, they are not stacked anywhere, and in most cases sales cannot be determined by simply multiplying price and quantity. Rather, it is usually the case that products are priced and designed very differently, depending on the customer’s requirements. Therefore, no enterprise resource planning system is suitable for managing service products. Rather, software must be able to extract products from a large number of orders, invoices, etc. and evaluate them.
Product overview for customers
In addition to a success-based evaluation, the first relevant question for many companies is which customers purchase which products or have purchased them in the past. For this purpose, teamspace offers a corresponding overview per customer.
Example: Software licenses of an IT company
Software licenses are a typical example of a service company’s products. For a monthly or annual fee, the company grants customers the right to use a certain service, in this example software. It is often difficult to determine which customers have which conditions, how many users take advantage of the license and when the contractual relationship began, as this information is sometimes scattered across different orders.
Product management helps IT companies extract license products from the multitude of orders and displays them in a clear list. It also offers the advantage that developments over time can be easily identified and read. For example, if the number of licenses has been increased several times, you can easily identify this.
How successful are my products?
This question is extremely interesting for many service companies. However, the evaluation is not quite easy for the reasons mentioned above. However, the new version of the teamspace business software offers service providers an intelligent method to create and manage products and make their success measurable. For this purpose, the software automatically searches all relevant documents for assigned items and lists them. This gives you a complete overview.
See your product success with teamspace
If you would also like to see an overview of your products and are interested in how successful your products are, test the teamspace business software now. Our consulting team will be happy to support you.