Full service contracts in the printing industry. An empirical investigation of service definition

This paper presents the preliminary result of an empirical investigation on the offering of document management solutions. In particular, this work addresses how the solution provider defines the requirements of the services that, through full service contracts, are bundled with products such as printers, multifunctional devices, wide format plotters, etc. Two case studies have been carried out among leading companies of the printing industry. Although explorative, this paper contributes to the debate on the servitization of manufacturing firms since it sheds lights on: i) the structure of the solution deployment process; ii) the competences and approaches played by the provider to define the service requirements, and; iii) the factors that influence the adoption of each approach.