Business services are a major part of the European economy and contribute to 11% of EU GDP. They include technical services such as engineering, architecture and IT as well as professional services such as legal and management consulting.
Business-to-business (B2B) service providers help other businesses for a flat or hourly fee. These firms assist customers in running their companies, reducing costs or generating more output. B2B service companies can be found in many sectors of the economy including insurance, telecommunications, manufacturing, construction and healthcare.
The industry is classified as a service-providing supersector. It has a high level of competition because it competes with large companies that have the financial resources to compete on price and quality.
Definition:
A service is a task or activity that benefits a company without delivering a physical product, usually for marketing, production, safety, cost and convenience purposes. These activities can be done by a single company, or they can be distributed to multiple locations and performed by a variety of people or equipment.
Strategic management:
A service-oriented business typically requires a different approach to strategic management than a product-oriented business. A product-oriented business is able to describe itself in a simple, concrete way that a service-oriented business is more difficult to do because the business is so much more abstract.
As a result, managers in service-oriented businesses are often left with a lot of unanswered questions about strategic management. As a result, top managers are constantly seeking to find new answers that can be applied to their particular situation.