Pattern description

Within this model, the availability of a product or service is guaranteed, resulting in almost zero downtime. The customer can use the offering as required, which minimizes losses resulting from downtime. The company uses expertise and economies of scale to lower operation costs and achieve these availability levels.

Inventive problems

Application examples

One of the first companies to provide fleet management was PHH Corporation, an American outfit that among other things provides customers with leasing and fleet management services with more than 580,000 vehicles based on Guaranteed Availability. PHH Corporation offers to manage a company’s entire fleet of vehicles in such a way that the customer has access to the required number of vehicles at all times, handling acquisition, finance, maintenance, safety, insurance, security, vehicle tracking, and all logistics and administration associated with the customer company’s fleet.

Another prominent example of the Guaranteed Availability pattern is the Liechtenstein-based anchoring specialist Hilti, which over ten years ago launched its Hilti Fleet Management scheme for hammer drills. Like a vehicle fleet manager, Hilti takes charge of managing its customers’ fleet of tools, taking full responsibility for all maintenance and repairs. If a tool is damaged, Hilti guarantees to either repair it or replace it at once. Such a reliable service is of course very beneficial to the customer, for whom downtime costs due to breakdowns, which can have a huge impact in the construction industry, are minimised.

MachineryLink is an American company that offers equipment and rental programmes with proprietary data services in the domain of agricultural machinery such as combine harvesters. Customers can rent harvesters and other farming equipment and are given access to the FarmLink analytics data service, which improves performance by providing them with up-to-the-minute harvest information on the weather, market prices and trends, crop conditions, etc. With MachineryLink’s rental service, customers can allocate capital to other areas of business rather than having to purchase machinery outright. Taken together, all these benefits attract customers and increase the company’s revenue. Thanks to the Guaranteed Availability concept MachineryLink is now one of the leading providers of combine harvesters in the United States.

References

The Business Model Navigator: 55 Models That Will Revolutionise Your Business