Plant Engineering: Old Wine in New Skins

Plant engineering companies design and construct power plants, petrochemical plants, steelmaking plants, drinking or wastewater plants, assembly plants, and production facilities for various other industries. Traditionally, plant engineering companies, in addition to their physical products, offer a large portfolio of pre- and after-sales services. Hence, servitisation is neither a new phenomenon nor rare in this industrial sector. Even advanced, result-oriented services such as the operation of newly constructed plants are frequently offered. In this chapter, different types of plant operation services provided by plant engineering companies are introduced. Because this type of service is transforming plant engineering companies into users of their own product technologies, the sources of value added for operational services are discussed in comparison to traditional business concepts of merely selling the plants and offering services such as training, maintenance, and the provision of spare parts. Furthermore, the economic performance of operational services will be depicted and the future relevance of this type of servitisation will be assessed. The empirical basis comes from the literature, case studies and firm documents.