Value Co-Creation in Industrial Buyer-Seller Partnerships ... - Doria

we have a new development in the product we change it at the Buyer. It can costmoney, sometimes big money, several hundreds of thousands or millions for the entirefleet. This is cost of conformance. But cost of non conformance, where the ship wouldstop for a week, will cost x million and this can be only due to some small bolt or pumpthat would cost x thousand. Now there also is an in-built security in the amount ofengines at the Buyer. They have been forerunners in installing one extra engine… ”(Interview: Seller 1)6.4.1 The knowledge feePart of the cooperation agreement was a knowledge fee. This fee was based upon anestimate of the amount of engine condition reports and technical information that the Sellerwas supposed to deliver to the Buyer.” The knowledge fee is a combination of information, there is an element which is dataanalysis. Which today is linked to MMS, or in other words was the foundation forMMS. The first phase of the knowledge fee was that the Buyer sends data files,millions of data files and that there is someone at the Seller who analyses the data andmakes recommendations. The next stage was MMS, the first you can call manualMMS. Now we are in the phase of on-line MMS. But the product “ knowledge” is…manifests itself in that there is a person who analyses the operation on the ship andproduces a piece of paper with recommendations for highest possible availability, thatnone of the engines stop, at the lowest possible cost.” (Interview: Seller 9)After the signing of the agreement, and establishment of the knowledge fee, expectationswere high at the Buyer. They wanted have condition reports and pro-active information ontechnical matters. However, the Seller was at this point unable to meet up to theexpectations and submit the agreed information; as a consequence Mr BR9 cancelled theknowledge fee part of the agreement in August 2000.“ … our goal has been to establish a reliability based maintenance program on theships and that we would have a relationship with the Seller that would build uponexchange of experiences and we would buy expertise from them on which we wouldbase… and spare parts, expertise based upon which we can do service work in-housewith our own manpower and do it as efficiently as possible.” (Interview: Buyer 9)The knowledge fee part of the cooperation agreement was resumed in the fall of 2002 whenthe Seller started to live up to the knowledge part of the agreement again.113