Open Access

Achim Kampker, Maximilian Lukas, Philipp Jussen

• Industrial service companies deliver technically complex services (inspection, maintenance, repair, improvement, installation) for an enormous variety of technical assets in the chemical, steel, food and pharmaceutical industry. This variety of assets leads to a corresponding variety of service processes. To ensure competitiveness, the management of industrial service companies aims to increase the service process efficiency, especially through service process standardization. However, decision-makers struggle to make knowledge-based decisions on service process standardization because ex-ante the cost-benefit ratios of process standardization are unknown. The missing understanding of cost-benefit ratios of process standardization is caused by a missing understanding, which interdependencies exist between process characteristics and process performance indicators. Thus, the objective of this paper is to determine suitable characteristics and performance indicators to measure the way service provision processes are executed in the industrial service sector. The results represent the basis for executing an empirical questionnaire study focusing on the execution of service provision processes and identifying the cause-effect relations of process standardization.