1. How would you position each of KTS’s services on the

‘four V’ dimensions of volume, variety, variation and visibility? Kaston-Trenton Service (KTS) was a domestic heating boiler maintenance company, based in the East of England.

Founded in the 1960s by plumber Christopher Trenton, it had grown substantially and was now run jointly by Christopher’s two children, Ros, who looked after all marketing, sales and finance, and Mark, who looked after operations and supply issues. The company initially offered maintenance and repair services to domestic (household) customers with gas or oil-burning boilers and had expanded into offering similar services to business customers. Within the last two years KTS had also moved beyond simply servicing systems, to designing and installing HVAC (heating, ventilating and air conditioning) systems for business customers.

‘Expanding into the design and installation business was something of a gamble’, according to Ros. ‘At the time, the B2B [business-to-business] part of our work was clearly showing more growth potential than our traditional domestic business, and servicing business customers was also more profitable. ????o far, the installation venture has had mixed success. The jobs that we have done have been successful and our new customers very satisfied, but so far we have lost money on them. Partly, this is because we have had to invest in extra workshop space at our headquarters and employ a system designer, who is relatively expensive

(but good) and only partly utilised at the moment. Hopefully, profitability will improve as the volume of installation jobs increases.’