Data management for servitization a new framework for manufacturing companies

Nowadays, manufacturing companies have realized that services can be a crucial part of their business, generating new profits and less imitable competitive advantages. It is not surprising therefore that many companies are increasingly moving from product-centric offerings to services and solutions, in what has been defined as servitization. This transformation has recently been accelerated by digital technologies that are enabling novel and sophisticated service offerings. Despite this, companies frequently struggle to exploit all the potential behind what has been defined as “digital servitization” as it still represents a tricky and complex transformation. In particular, the relationship between IoT technologies, (big) data and servitization seems to be still not understood by companies. This is also due to the fact that few models in literature have tried to consider all the relevant factors in the data management process from a servitization perspective. To fill this gap, this paper aims to provide a hierarchical framework to assess how manufacturing companies are addressing the potentiality offered by the data collected from product to improve service business.