Intermixed Product and Service Boundaries: Exploring Servitization in Sheet Metal Industry

In the sheet metal industry, single machines or more complex production systems are integrated with a software needed to control them. While it is clear both for the company and the client that the machine is a product offered with the related services, the software deserves more attention. In the company where our team has been involved in an action research program, the software is conceived as a product with its related services, but this concept has not been properly transmitted to clients, who don’t recognize it and pretend software services for free. In this industry, machinery is linked to its software and both are enhanced by the related services, so the final product-service bundle should be made by four components.In order to better clarify this concept and illustrate the solutions our research team has identified to promote a complete PSS offer, the four-leg chair metaphor is proposed. The proper value of the whole PSS offer can be transmitted by an effective communication process, supporting sales people with instruments such as predefined packets for software services. Organisational changes should be adopted such as job enlargement for software technicians and cross-training with salespeople. By the former, software technicians, who are frontline employees in direct contact with customers during the training phase, can be transformed into internal entrepreneurs by proper incentives. Since they lack marketing education and sometimes trust of salespeople, cross-training is proposed as an effective way to keep in touch software technicians with salespeople with mutual learning.