Mission possible: progress driven by a change of perspective
Oliver Winter is responsible for security services and portfolio management at Bosch Energy and Building Solutions. He and his team develop ideas for tomorrow’s solutions and services. They know that it isn’t always necessary to redo everything from scratch to drive progress and innovation. Just rethinking things can make a big difference. Simply paying attention and being open to new ideas can already be the basis for improving a feature of a solution, for example.
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Sometimes it only takes a tweak to take a solution to the next level. Oliver Winter, in charge of service and portfolio management in the security division, hunts for the crucial details that will benefit the customers of Bosch Energy and Building Solutions. His mission: to improve the solutions and services that are already in Bosch’s portfolio while developing new ones based on customers’ requirements. He’s supported by a team of engineering, business management, and user experience experts who also aren’t shy about tapping the potential of digitalization, IoT, and connectivity.
Oliver Winter has been with Bosch for 15 years. After completing a dual study program in industrial engineering and an MBA, he spent years thoroughly familiarizing himself with the field of building security while working across sales, technology, management accounting, strategic marketing, and product management. Along the way, Oliver had an aha moment: “There isn’t a demand for everything that’s technologically doable.” Since taking charge of service and portfolio management in the company’s security department three years ago, he’s been driven by the realization that whether a product succeeds or flops depends on the user experience (UX). “Customers will only use a product and recommend it to others if it’s a good fit to their needs and they really feel good about it.” He also knows that in the data-driven world of building technology, progress and innovation don’t always mean redoing everything from scratch. Sometimes all it takes is a minor improvement.
For this reason, information from talks with customers and UX analyses isn’t all that is applied to optimize a solution or develop a new one. Installed security technologies also deliver data that can be evaluated and analyzed. Winter and his team therefore use what he calls “product IoT-ization”. The outcome can be an additional feature that makes a solution easier to use, or a new digital process that resolves a particular problem that a customer is experiencing. Winter therefore sees his role as that of an enabler: “I think it’s important for us to focus our work on the users. What we learn in the process lets us come up with ideas for new solutions and services.” To accomplish this, Winter repeatedly mediates among the 26 experts of his interdisciplinary team. “My job is to merge the varied perspectives of all the experts that we have on the team. I also keep an eye on the timeframe and budget while getting the goal in better focus.”
A fresh look: How do users experience the product?
So at the start there is an idea of what could be improved. Say, for example, a customer keeps running into a problem at the same point. Take an intrusion alarm system with motion sensors and alarms, for example. If the system can’t be quickly armed, the customer’s security staff go over the corresponding floor to discover the reason why. Maybe someone simply forgot to close a window? “We know from support requests and feedback received by our service team that this situation comes up pretty often,” says Winter. He sees it as a chance to figure out what could help the customer. And his team agrees: “It ties up the customer’s staff, interferes with operation, and may mean working overtime.”
Winter loves to turn things around with his team and take the customer’s perspective. This is key for new projects. “When talking with customers, we take an unbiased stance. We keep our eyes and ears open and try to absorb as much as possible about things that we could improve. And then we go even deeper,” he says about their UX research approach. They systematically investigate and analyze the user experience with the goal of improving the products or services involved. “Experience has also shown that even when we find a possible way to improve something, the customer may not see a need for it.”
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Phase one of every project: being creative and collecting ideas as a team -
The ideas are then put to the test. Only the one that convinces is presented to the customer
While searching for creative ideas, quantity initially trumps quality – the first step is to come up with as many suggestions for improvements as possible for dealing with that specific challenge. “Nothing is treated as exaggerated or out of the question. Every idea can inspire us to invent new approaches,” says Winter. After the brainstorming phase, the engineers, technicians, business experts, and UX researchers on Winter’s team evaluate the proposals, and the one they consider to be most convincing is shown to the customer. This is the first acid test. If the feedback is positive, the team rolls up its sleeves to work out the technical details of the idea.
Winter’s team also builds on experience gained with the NEXOSPACE Fire System Analyzer, which already exists and monitors all of a building’s fire alarm systems. Next to “operational status” a smiley with changing facial expressions shows at a glance whether anything needs to be resolved or everything is in the green zone. This may sound trivial, but it’s a real game changer. “Also in the case of the intrusion alarm system, we need to process the raw data into intuitive, meaningful information. The goal is to simplify technical data to a much greater extent. And to do so, we have to understand how the systems are used in actual practice, and what customers need to have displayed when and how so they can tell at a glance whether there are any alarms or system shutdowns,” explains Winter.
“Best case, we succeed in delighting the customer with a new idea. But even then, a solution or improvement needs to pass through a few other defined Bosch processes before it can be put on the market for customers,” explains Winter. He has done his job well, and he and his team are happy when their ideas lead to new Bosch technologies, solutions, or services that help customers master their challenges better. Then they go back to square one and start looking for another tweak that will take a solution to the next level: “Our customers share so many valuable experiences and insights with us. It’s awesome that they trust us so deeply, and that we can take what they give us and use it to derive an improvement or something completely new.”
