Surplus of service-based business models - the integration of multiple perspectives for assessing win-win potentials

Service-based business models are becoming increasingly more important for the capital goods industry. However, manufacturers of plants still hesitate to offer these customer-oriented solutions to their clients, due to existing uncertainties resulting from economic risks. Certainly these business models do not only hold hazards, but unexplored potentials too. This paper shows how to use life cycle costing for the evaluation of service-based business models by presenting an approach, which can be used as management accounting instrument, identifying win-win potentials for the manufacturers and their clients. The practical ability of this method will be shown by means of three case studies taken from the robot industry.