ABSTRACT
Manufacturing companies operate in global environments where competition is increasingly aggressive. To remain competitive, they need to differentiate themselves by updating and expanding their offerings to customers, for instance through the digitalization and servitization phenomena, which allow companies to innovate business models in this direction. This paper deals with an analysis of the subscription business model, which has recently attracted the attention of manufacturing companies for the possibility to establish long-term partnerships with customers by providing services on a continuous basis in return of recurring payments. After a first analysis of the literature on this topic, the effective implementation of the subscription model in the manufacturing environment is analyzed through a case study. The analysis shows that the development of subscription models is strengthened by the utilization of digital tools since they enable processing customers’ data for new service offering generation, leading companies to differentiate their business towards customer-centric solutions. In conjunction, the case study shows how barriers to the implementation of subscription models in the manufacturing sector are still present. Despite this, the Covid-19 pandemic has highlighted the potential of this offer, allowing companies to stay in touch with their customers, and to maintain, or even increase, the revenue streams. © 2022, IFIP International Federation for Information Processing.
ABSTRACT
The COVID-19 Pandemic has caused an economic breakdown, especially in the manufacturing industry. Manufacturing companies have used Digital service to stay in contact with their customers and as a source of revenue even during the general lockdown An exploratory focus group has been carried out to understand the problems and opportunities manufacturing companies went and are going through and to suggest open research questions that both research and industry should explore further. To deeply analyses the content of the discussion, Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) was used to identify the main research topics. 4 topics were identified as the most relevant to be investigated: digitalization and collaboration emerged as the most interesting trends that will characterize the new normal. For each of the topics, insights, critical points and research questions are presented and discussed, reporting the main evidence of the focus group discussion. © 2021, IFIP International Federation for Information Processing.