Business Model Development towards Service Management 4.0

There is an increasing interest to ensure operational and maintenance (O&M) operations from a strategic perspective, and there are opportunities for both producing companies and service providers to gain benefits. Research shows that the combined business models (products combined with services) have a positive effect on the business. Likewise, it is profitable to think strategically and in long term for enterprises offering maintenance services, especially using performance-based models. But for achieving these benefits the view of the business has to change. The focus should be on the values created and not in the offers in form of products or services. Moreover, the company needs to position itself as an actor not only in the value chain, but in a wider context referred to as the business ecosystem. Making such a shift of focus is hard though, and there is a need to understand both the current state of the business as well as the potential future directions. The framework presented in this paper is an attempt to meet these needs. The framework describes business model development in four levels. From maturity point of view, the four steps could be seen as the logical development of the business model from a narrow technical perspective to a holistic product-service perspective. The four levels could also be connected to the industrial development where level four supports Industry 4.0. Level four is referred to as Service Management 4.0. In particular, four key concepts reflect the concept of Service Management 4.0: the mix of products and services in customer offers, performance-based contracts, partnering and the business ecology concept. (C) 2016 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.