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

survey 14 that the Seller had conducted to investigate the status of the relationship, to providea presentation of the technical support for the XX-type engine to the Buyer, and to discussfurther development items as well as the future of the cooperation agreement.6.9.1 Seller’s vision and missionThe president of the marine business at the Seller, started the seminar by presenting theSeller’ s vision. He pointed out the differences between cruise owners and other ship owners,where different customer preferences and values result in different strategies and actionsfrom the Seller. A large portion of new building purchases in other ship segments are morespeculative and do not emphasize operational costs and reliability aspects in the samemanner as cruise new buildings. He stated that the Seller’ s business is to provide the mostcompetitive, reliable, and environmentally sound solutions to ship power and distributedpower generation markets through the worldwide network of professional the Seller people.The importance of customer satisfaction was also stressed. The mission is to improve theperformance and profitability of the customers’ business by providing reliable and costeffectivetotal marine power solutions while fully respecting environmental demands. TheSeller has traditionally been an internally driven organization i.e. “ We sell what we make” .In the future the company wants to focus on being a market-focused organization, focusingon customer benefits. There should be a disciplined choice of which benefits to provide andwhich to withhold. By understanding customer needs, benefits and its own capabilities, theSeller wants to be a market-focused organization that is also able to choose which benefitsnot to provide. (Presentation at partnership seminar, SR7, 24.5.2004).6.9.2 Follow up on agreed items from the last partnership seminarThe status of the action items was reviewed. A number of the items on the list had beencompleted. The updated list was to be distributed after the seminar. There was discussion ofthe items that had not yet been completed and actions planned in order to complete them.14 CPR uses a questionnaire where the respondents rate about 15 statements on a scale from 1 to 10. CPR hasbeen in use in the Seller to track customer perception of the Seller’ s performance as well as Seller’ s selfevaluationduring the different phases of a customer relationship. For the focal relationship purpose the tool hasbeen adapted to measure the values, the Vision statement, and also to measure the perceived performance of boththe Buyer and the Seller, which means that there are about 30 statements. The responses are processed by anindependent research institute who prepares the report.127