Developing a Maturity Model for Digital Servitization in Manufacturing Firms

In today’s rapidly changing markets, manufacturing firms are increasingly challenged by the convergence of digital technologies and servitization, which is defined as Digital Servitization. Enterprises struggle to grasp this phenomenon’s vision, constantly facing pressures to obtain and retain competitive advantage, inventing and reinventing new products and services, reducing costs and time to market, and enhancing quality at the same time. They need to define improvement actions to be taken to navigate through the transformation process and prioritize between different activities. Prior research has highlighted the importance of how to proceed into this transformation, however less emphasis has been put on suggesting suitable activities that fit the organization’s current status and future goals. To overcome this challenge, we propose a maturity model for digital servitization that serves as an assessment tool. The design of our maturity model is grounded in literature and expert interviews. During its evolutionary development, we gathered, structured and organized several critical requirements for digital servitization. We could also explore and highlight important attributes that must be examined by companies during the transformational process. We contribute by our proposed maturity model that serves companies not only as a diagnostics tool to assess the current situation, but also as a guideline for continuous improvement.