Abstract
Purpose: The paper assesses different organizational solutions allowing customer contact over both servitization and digital servitization journey of well-established manufacturers.
Design/Methodology/Approach: The study is exploratory and based on two case studies. The first case refers to servitization taking place in the pre-digital era and it has been retrieved in the servitization literature. The second refers to a manufacturer that recently entered a digital servitization journey. This in-depth case study has been developed by applying a longitudinal approach. Empirical data has been collected through company’s reports, observations and a focus group.
Findings: Servitization and digital servitization trajectories have a different nature despite the journey rests in both cases on the same traditional set of product-service systems (PSS). By disentangling the different types of PSS, the comparison of the two journeys shows that organizational solutions overlap until service modules are not commodified. Specifically, in the servitization journey the deployment of front-office staff in the delivery of advanced services is crucial. On the other hand, in digital servitization journey, R&D department is the core of service capability development and it is the servitization driver.
Originality/Value: The resulting differences coming to light from the comparison of these two journey offer manufacturers a more comprehensive understanding about the organizational solutions allowing the delivery of PSS in both servitization and digital servitization strategies.