Approach to e-classification and e-tradability of complex industrial services

Service procurement is still source of high costs to companies. Enterprise information systems (such as enterprise resource planning (ERP) or procurement systems, etc.) do not adequately support electronic procurement of industrial services. Business processes suffer today from poor quality of underlying master data in supportive information systems. This results in negative effects on transaction and process costs. Observable shortfall lies in effective interoperability between IT products and service descriptions. Information management systems do not take into account the characteristics of service specific administrative processes which has negative effects on process costs. In this paper we argue that e-classification of services results in better, standardized data in service procurement processes, as prerequisite for enhanced spend analysis and outsourcing decisions. In the paper we will have a clear focus on industrial maintenance services.