Melanie's research focuses on engineering service provision, an increasingly important strategy for manufacturers to stay competitive and differentiate themselves from competitors with lower production and operation costs globally. This phenomenon is typically described as servitization and requires a systems approach to its implementation and management. This means that they need to engage in service-based operations, which includes intangible offerings, that are highly dependent on customer inputs (timing and quality), and require customer-centered processes. This dichotomy between manufacturing-based tradition (tangible offering, production processes etc) and service-based operations creates high levels of uncertainty for manufacturers in terms of (external) environmental influences, (internal) organisational contradictions, and relational engagements with customers.

Exemplar research questions of Melanie's work include:

• How do organisations experience relational uncertainty in service dyads?
• How do organisations reduce relational uncertainty through suitable organisational responses to increase service quality?
• What uncertainty types do organisations expose themselves to in different servitization set-ups (dyads and triads)?
• What organisational responses to organisations engage in to reduce this uncertainty exposure in servitized triads?
• How is the complexity of the service offering (service complexity) linked to the uncertainty during service operations?
• How do organisations innovate their service business within a network of external partners?

Melanie's research contributes to theory building in the multi-disciplinary field of engineering services and servitization, comprising areas such as innovation management, operations management, and industrial marketing. These contributions have a strong theoretical and empirical nature. My research provides strong managerial implications for manages in manufacturing firms who follow a servitization strategy.

• Decision making under uncertainty
• engineering services
• servitization
• uncertainty