Abstract
PurposeIndustry 4.0 is dramatically affecting businesses behaviours and strategies, transforming products design, manufacture, operations and services. An outcome of this transformation is digital servitization. This paper aims to contribute to the extant literature about digital servitization in B2B contexts by analysing how I4.0-based servitization affects the quality of supplier–customer relationships.Design/methodology/approachThe authors adopted a qualitative methodology based on an exploratory multiple case study. In particular, the study included 22 Italian B2B manufacturing firms whose I4.0-based digital servitization approaches are described and, then, analysed in relation to the quality of supplier–customer relationships.FindingsThe access to customers and data is critical to enable advanced digital services and for improving relationship quality; the levels of relational intimacy and informational openness lead to two subsequent levels of data-driven efficiency and data-driven effectiveness, impacting significantly on relationship quality and enabling relational innovation.Originality/valueThe research explores the link, so far underestimated, between digital servitization and relationship quality in industrial contexts.
Highlights
Over the past decade, an increasing amount of articles in operations and supply chain management literature focussed on the set of technologies – IoT (Internet of things), cloud platforms, big data (BD) and data analysis (DA) – of the so-called Fourth Industrial Revolution (Industry 4.0, I4.0) (Frank et al, 2019; Schmidt and Wagner, 2019; Gunasekaran et al, 2019)
The findings suggest that access to customers and data is critical to enable advanced digital services and for improving relationship quality; the levels of relational intimacy and informational openness lead to two subsequent levels of data-driven efficiency and data-driven effectiveness, impacting significantly on relationship quality and enabling relational innovation
Recent research acknowledges that IoT-based industrial domains are perfect research settings for the so-called co-created servitization (Green et al, 2017), a value-creating approach which lies on the service-dominant (S-D) logic (Vargo and Lusch, 2008) and, basically, empathizes all the key underpinnings of the concept of relationship quality between supplier and customer
Summary
An increasing amount of articles in operations and supply chain management literature focussed on the set of technologies – IoT (Internet of things), cloud platforms, big data (BD) and data analysis (DA) – of the so-called Fourth Industrial Revolution (Industry 4.0, I4.0) (Frank et al, 2019; Schmidt and Wagner, 2019; Gunasekaran et al, 2019). The exploitation of IoT was found crucial for the development, implementation and success of relationship marketing strategies in a very heterogeneous set of industrial contexts, such as the camping industry or the power thermal management (Lo and Campos, 2018) Despite such indirect but promising evidences from other research streams, scholars in the field of operations management paid only marginal attention to the link between I4.0-based servitization and the quality of supplier–customer relationship. In their exploratory qualitative study, Rymaszewska and her co-authors (2017) report the that support to customer success, which indirectly augments the relationship quality between partners, is a central element of the value creation achieved by the supplier via IoT-based servitization. Recent research acknowledges that IoT-based industrial domains are perfect research settings for the so-called co-created servitization (Green et al, 2017), a value-creating approach which lies on the service-dominant (S-D) logic (Vargo and Lusch, 2008) and, basically, empathizes all the key underpinnings of the concept of relationship quality (e.g., commitment, trust) between supplier and customer
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