Date
Tuesday 27 November
Time
9.45am – 1.00pm
Location
WMSNT Ltd Headquarters, 80 Park Road (Via Upper Thomas Street), Birmingham, B6 5PL (for sat navs please use B6 5DD)
Organisers
Aston Business School
The event itself
Aston Business School is offering a programme of free support to manufacturing SMEs (small and medium enterprises) in the West Midlands, to help them to understand how to: strengthen their relationships with customers; create new and resilient revenue streams; and set high barriers for competitors, through a process called servitization.
Servitization is the process of changing your business model, to offer advanced services coupled with products, rather than just the products alone. This means providing a holistic solution to your customers, helping to improve their competitiveness, rather than just engaging in single transactions through the sale of a physical product.
Servitization can help to reduce the amount of energy/ raw materials involved in making or utilising products, representing a shift away from a materialist culture of ownership. In the case of servitization, the customer often does not own the product they are using: they just pay for its services for as long as they need it. That way, when they do not need that particular function anymore, they aren’t left with a product that’s redundant and gets scrapped.
All of the support is free of charge to eligible companies, as it is part funded by the West Midlands European Regional Development Fund.
Aston Business School is running a series of half day events to introduce servitization and what it might mean for your business. At these events you will hear from large companies that have servitized successfully, and from SMEs that have been through their workshop programme and are considering adopting new business strategies.
How to attend
For further information and details on how to attend, please call Eleanor Musson on 0121 204 3580 or email servitization@aston.ac.uk.
