Boeing as a service provider: W.P. Carey's Center for Services Leadership

A couple of my favorite quotes:

"Services are just very hard to get your head wrapped around," says Gravell. "Sometimes you can lose the big picture of what you're doing with them. It's more complex than the product side -- not from a technical standpoint, but from a value-creation and customer service standpoint."

And

The Boeing of today has its field service reps providing tech expertise not only to new customers rolling out new platforms or new product, but also to old customers managing mature platforms. The company is constantly seeking new ways to keep its clients and make their operations more manageable. The goal, Shaheen says, is to ensure that the Boeing customer experience is positive, consistent and reliable.

Read the rest here. 

There is a growing interest among academics to understand this transition from a pure manufacturing role to one of service, sometimes called servitization, the idea that manufacturers transition into being service providers.  The difficulty is the experience part, as said in the article in needs to be positive, consistent and reliable.  I'm certain we will hear more about it.