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

We learn their way of handling things and we learn to cooperate.” (Interview: Seller1)New business through product developmentBoth the Buyer and the Seller have expressed the possibility creating new business anddeveloping products and ideas together as a benefit of the partnership. One practicalexample of such a joint product development effort is Machinery Management System(MMS). MMS is a service product offered by the Seller, which has been jointly developedwith customers. The idea of MMS is that the Seller monitors the engines from the Sellerfactory in Vaasa through electronic transmission of engine data from the ship. The aim forthe MMS is to monitor engines and do maintenance according to actual conditions. TheSeller’ s aim is to “ tie up” customers to the system, monitor the engines, and plan andexecute the maintenance work when it is most suitable and causes the least interruption inthe customer’ s operations. This service product is sold at a fixed price, which should allowfor more accurate planning and allocating of resources by the customer.“ … the MMS concept is on its way, the condition based maintenance concept that wehave introduced recently. We will have some two hundred engines tied up to it duringthis year. One of the first ones to have it installed was one of the Buyer’s ships, theNN I believe it is. The first systems have technically been co-developed with thecustomers, of which the Buyer is one... (Interview: Seller 9)Another device that has bee co-developed with the customer is a safety box on the enginesto protect people from touching and getting burned on hot spots on the engine.“ … we have developed safety boxes on the engines in order to cover hot spots. If youlook at an engine with an infrared- or heat-sensitive camera, you can clearly see thatthere are certain areas, which are not covered, that get red hot, or rise above a certaintemperature. And there are IMO regulations regarding certain temperature limits fordifferent engines… because it is a safety risk. There we have managed quite well withour development...” (Interview: Seller 1)Flexible hoses are an example of another product that has been co-developed with thecustomer.“ There have also been flexible hoses that we have developed, and the Buyer hashelped us to get approval from them with the classification society, which is known forbeing… As one starts thinking about it, there are actually a number of things where wehave been pushed to development, also technically.” (Interview: Seller 1)147