Independent Providers

These days, the media seems to drown out any signs of business success with mass hysteria over zombie banks, weeping over market meltdown and gnashing of teeth in anticipation of the next shocker. Through it all, my own business is doing better than it ever has. Among my clients, many are experiencing dramatic increases in business. Some are doing much better than they were doing just six months ago. Certainly, there are businesses that are in or circling the drain but is it totally bleak out there? No. Not for the enterprising service provider.

When Microsoft merged companies including Great Plains, Solomon and Navision under the Microsoft Business Solutions (MBS) umbrella, service management had to reexamine business models, assimilate conflicting product support policies, integrate different systems and present customers with a unified global services offering. Here’s a recap of a presentation Jana Reinke gave early in October 2004. It wasn’t easy. Reinke recalls how each company had a different way of dealing with just about every aspect of service and support. Here are some of the tough decisions Reinke faced: Services Offerings

Last year, the big fuss in the US was about all those information technology (IT) jobs moving overseas. Politicians and news reporters fretted over prized IT jobs migrating from the West to lower-cost, offshore companies in India, China or some other country. Here’s an example of the exact opposite: a Chinese company is outsourcing its repair services to a US services company. This examples shows, as many have suspected, that companies seek partners based on business and economic reasons regardless of location or politics. They follow the path of optimal outsourcing. Recently, I spoke with George Harris, President and CEO of GA Services, LLC., a privately-held service provider based in Irvine, California. He shared with me the following experience.

Those who service and support healthcare technologies have struggled to deal with numerous challenges they face on the job. Like their counterparts in other service industries, clinical technology service professionals suffer from a lack of professional recognition, an absence of comprehensive operational standards and cost inefficiencies.