Research On New ICTs-powered Servitization And Its Value Creation

As the manufacturing industry now facing increasing fierce competition,it is difficult to gain competitive advantage only by selling.More and more manufacturing enterprises create value to maintain their competitive advantages through servitization.In particular,the new ICTs(information and communication technologies)represented by the Internet of Things has set off the third wave of transformation of manufacturing enterprises in recent years.Manufacturing enterprises have applied various new ICTs to provide customers with diversified services,which has effectively promoted servitization of manufacturing.However,it is still in the initial stage for manufacturing enterprises to implement servitization using new ICTs.How new ICTs supports servitization of manufacturing and how to realize value creation is a problem faced by academia and the industry.Based on the analysis of the above problems,it is found that servitization is one of the effective ways to realize value creation.servitization is the means and value creation is the goal,and there is a progressive relationship between them.Therefore,it is necessary to explore how manufacturing enterprises apply new ICTs to realize servitization,and then explore the value creation process of servitization under the new ICTs environment.Besides,from the perspective of the problem,both of them belong to the question of "how",so they are suitable for the case study.More specifically,when exploring the supporting role of new ICTs in servitization,we use multiple cases to explain how four typical manufacturing enterprises apply the new ICTs to provide customers with various services,so as to comprehensively summarize the new ICTs functions used by manufacturing enterprises and service types offered to customers in the context of new ICTs.It also analyzes the corresponding relationship between various functions of new ICTs and services,and then explains the supporting role of new ICTs on servitization from the micro level.When exploring the value creation process of servitization driven by new ICTs,the most typical XCMG group was selected as the research object,and a single case is used to discuss its value creation process in more depth.From the perspective of value chain,this paper discusses the changes of servitization value creation activities under the application of new ICTs and its influence on the way of value creation.It also discusses the role of data,information and knowledge transfer,integration,processing and sharing to support value creation activities.Finally,a model of servitization value creation process driven by new ICTs is constructed.The model mainly consists of four parts: support system,function of new ICTs,value creation activity and value creation mode,and the relationship among all parts of the model is explained.This paper explores the role of new ICTs in servitization of manufacturing,and further investigates the process of value creation though servitization powered by new ICTs.The result provides a theoretical basis for the in-depth study of servitization of manufacturing under the new ICTs era,as well as manufacturing enterprises to achieve intelligent,servitization and high-end transformation.