Service doesn't work today. And it isn't the people's fault.
Why "one more portal" is the wrong answer, and what we learned from a decade of service in machine building.
By Gerd Bart, Founder and Managing Director · Published
Picture the typical service case. A machine reports a fault. What happens first? Someone writes an email. Or makes a call. Then comes a follow-up question: Which machine exactly? Which serial number? Which software version? Then a second follow-up. Then the search for the right contact. Then scheduling. Then sorting out the spare part.
And while all of that happens, the machine does one thing: nothing.
Downtime is the most expensive state an industrial plant can be in. What costs money is the time between problem and resolution. And the bitter part: most of that time is not repair time. It is coordination time.
We say this firmly and without blaming anyone. Service isn't broken because people do bad work. Service technicians, dispatchers and plant operators do good work, inside a system that forces friction on them. You can't be efficient in a badly built system. You can only fail bravely.
The industry has been making the wrong diagnosis for years
When service doesn't work, the industry's reflex is always the same: one more system. A customer portal. A service portal. An app. A dashboard. Every machine builder builds its own. With good intentions, real investment, often seven-figure budgets.
From the plant operator's point of view, the result is a paradox. The more manufacturers build their own portal, the worse the operator's problem gets. Because the operator doesn't have machines from one manufacturer. They run a mixed fleet, grown over years, from many manufacturers. And now they are supposed to log in to a separate portal for each of them, learn its logic and keep track of its contacts.
More systems don't solve an island problem. They multiply the islands.
We can say this so plainly because we built the islands ourselves
Since 2013, we developed customer portals for machine builders. Serious systems: asset management with the bill of materials behind it, spare parts catalogs, online shops, the complete technical documentation for each machine, available to the customer. They were good portals. They worked. Customers liked them.
But we kept building them again. Every project from scratch. The same building blocks, reassembled and adapted for the next customer. And every time, the end result was another isolated island.
When we founded Transaction-Network in 2021, we had the insight that changed everything for us. It makes no sense to keep building single customer portals, no matter how standardized. As long as you think from the individual machine builder's side, you only ever build another island.
“As long as you think from the manufacturer's side, you only ever build the next island.”
Built around the machine
So we made a decision that looked almost irrational on paper: no more portals. Instead, what a portal can never become: a shared, neutral service infrastructure that belongs to no single manufacturer, where machine builders, plant operators and suppliers finally work in the same process.
The fixed point in service is the machine. It has to run, depending on the industry, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. For that to work, the people who work on it finally have to work together: in one process instead of a thousand inboxes.
On this infrastructure, a fault creates a process: a clear, structured, executable job with all the information and all the people needed to resolve it. The coordination step that eats up the time today disappears.
Other systems help you discuss problems. Transaction-Network makes sure they get solved.
This isn't just our opinion
As early as 2020, the VDMA and McKinsey study "Customer centricity as an opportunity for the digital breakthrough" reached the same conclusion: for most machine builders, going it alone with their own solution doesn't pay off, and the study recommends compatibility and standards. And manufacturer independence is something customers explicitly ask for. Today, with connected plants and AI, that recommendation is the precondition for staying competitive in service.
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