It's enough to start some experimenting but not enough for adoption. For fee-based services, the dominant problem is lowering costs. For customers, seeing is believing. Suppliers need to show that they can go beyond talking a general game and actually quantify the benefits to the individual customer's specific business. Customers weren't able to indicate whether their suppliers could do this because in most cases even the most rudimentary conversation had not yet taken place.
Distributors have an even higher hill to climb for fee-based services.
Almost half of customers indicated that none of their suppliers had started a conversation. To be sure, suppliers are offering solutions that offer benefits such as contract manufacturing and inventory management, but customers clearly said that distributors remain primarily a source for products. Until the case is made that they can also be a source for services, customers said that their purchases of services would not take off. Fully 90 percent of factories do not planto buy services in the future despite any current arrangements. Until then, service sales by distributors will remain a situational or occasional trend, not a common method of doing business.