Industrial services had been identified by the sponsor as the primary growth and margin lever, with higher GM, lower capital intensity, and stickier customers. But the service business behaved like dozens of independent country P&Ls glued to a shared brand. No common offering catalogue, no inter-country campaign roll-outs, no service-level KPI cockpit, no shared view of where the next euro of GP would come from. Industry knowledge sat in individual heads. Country GMs had full optionality and the centre had limited grip.

A 24-month operator-led programme, governed by a small steering committee and embedded in the line organisation, not run as a parallel consulting workstream. After a brief diagnostics phase the scope was deliberately fenced to a few countries and a few promising client industries. Industry teams were established with named experts per vertical. Pilot campaigns launched in Poland, Austria, France and Germany using existing offerings while the catalogue was structured in parallel. Speed over perfection. A SKU logic was introduced for service offerings and tagged in the CRM, enabling clean reporting on what was sold, to whom, in which industry. With initial opportunity capture tested, scale-up to 20 country markets across the Americas and the Middle East covering 16 industry verticals was successfully implemented.

Compared to baseline, revenue from the service business grew 36% and profitability 33%, supported by leveraging existing service capacity more effectively. New customers, measured by application deliveries, grew 92%. Over 200 service offerings were codified after 24 months. 24 dedicated service sales campaigns generated nearly 400 new leads.