The role of digital technologies for the service transformation of industrial companies

By Marco Ardolino, Mario Rapaccini, Nicola Saccani, Paolo Gaiardelli, Giovanni Paolo Crespi, Carlo Ruggeri. International Journal of Production Research, 2018

609 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The role of digital technologies in service business transformation is under-investigated. This paper contributes to filling this gap by addressing how the Internet of things (IoT), cloud computing (CC) and predictive analytics (PA) facilitate service transformation in industrial companies. Through the Data–Information–Knowledge–Wisdom (DIKW) model, we discuss how the abovementioned technologies transform low-level entities such as data into information and knowledge to support the service transformation of manufacturers. We propose a set of digital capabilities, based on the extant literature and the findings from four case studies. Then, we discuss how these capabilities support the service transformation trajectories of manufacturers. We find that IoT is foundational to any service transformation, although it is mostly needed to become an availability provider. PA is essential for moving to the performance provider profile. Besides providing scalability in all profiles, CC is specifically used to implement an industrialiser strategy, therefore leading to standardised, repeatable and productised offerings.

Subfields: Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering, Management Information Systems, Marketing

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/db5a7bdc4b6258606b2c2d91a4bd3835182731f9

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Citations in the corpus

Transforming provider-customer relationships in digital servitization: A relational view on digitalization (2020, background): “Digitalization has actually stimulated companies to move from product-centric models to digital service-oriented offerings (Adrodegari & Saccani, 2017; Ardolino et al., 2018; Rust & Huang, 2014).”
Digital servitization business models in ecosystems: A theory of the firm (2019, background): “The advantage is created through processes and activities, through which technology companies create value from competencies and resources located internally or externally (Ardolino et al., 2018; Coreynen et al., 2017; Huikkola & Kohtamäki, 2017; Visnjic et al., 2018).”
The Healthcare Sustainable Supply Chain 4.0: The Circular Economy Transition Conceptual Framework with the Corporate Social Responsibility Mirror (2019, background): “[14] are the implementation and the role of the IoT, of the Cloud Computing (CC), and of the Predictive Analytics (PA).”
Exploring How Usage-Focused Business Models Enable Circular Economy through Digital Technologies (2018, methodology): “Moreover, among the several digital technologies highlighted by the fourth industrial revolution, only IoT, Big Data, and analytics have been considered, in accordance with recent works in this field [5,52,53].”
Navigating disruptive crises through service-led growth: The impact of COVID-19 on Italian manufacturing firms (2020, neutral): “This was assessed by checking the impact of the crisis on the adoption of digital technologies for data management, service innovation, and service delivery, encompassing some of the technologies analyzed by Ardolino et al. (2018) and Paschou et al. (2020).”
Transformational shifts through digital servitization (2020, positive): “This disruption and changed mindset drives digital servitization: the deployment of digital technologies to support the transformation from a product-centric to a service-centric business model (Ardolino et al., 2018; Coreynen, Matthyssens, & Van Bockhaven, 2017).”
The applications of Industry 4.0 technologies in manufacturing context: a systematic literature review (2020, background): “This phenomenon is known in the literature as ‘servi-tization’, which can be strengthened by the integration of digital technologies (Ardolino et al. 2018).”