Analysis of the future requirements for a technical service

Abstract

This master thesis is structured in such a way that the reader is given an overview of the TÜV Austria Group, its beginnings and the emergence of today's organically grown structures. Moreover the current organization is described in brief to better understand all the issues linked to it.TÜV Austria has become the predominant Technical Service in Austria and is rapidly expanding in emerging markets. This leads to several new issues which in many cases yield the known problems of the existing organizational structures. In the main section of the thesis the future requirements for a Technical Service is discussed in a more general way, because the known issues are common amongst all players in this field. Therefore the mechanisms of the market and organizational issues are addressed directly. The liberalization is rapidly evolving in many markets, where formerly Technical Services exclusively served the markets. With respect to game theory, the game changes as soon as a new player enters the market. This happens with the liberalization efforts of governments and institutions such as the European Union. Organizational restructuring is essential in mastering the new market situation. Up to now, a Technical Service had not necessarily to deal with marketing and intensified customer relationship, because the asymmetry of the markets brought thecustomers to the test engineers. Now, in the liberalized markets, tremendous efforts in disciplines such as customer retention and marketing have to be undertaken in order to achieve sustainable business success and moderate growth of the business. Moreover, new disciplines have to be introduced which have not been an issue up to now. Intangible assets, such as training of the test engineers, career- and succession planning as well as fostering the spirit of innovation are the answer to the emerging problems. Each Technical Service now has to spend a certain amount of its revenues on intangibles to generate a spinning wheel. It is a critical task, to infect especially the long term employees with the new mindset. This makes it often necessary to reorganize the current branches and business divisions to achieve a healthy mix of new employees bringing a driven spirit into the organization with long term employees with huge experience but who are often skeptical towards the changes. 7 Customers demand new structures too, otherwise the Technical Service will fail to meet the governing business model. In the last section of the thesis, the measures derived from the above topics are discussed with respect to the TÜV Austria Group and possible problems in transforming the company. Some of the issues, such as training and customer relationship are already under development and the current status is discussed and compared against the ideal measures.