Classification-based Planning of Smart Service Portfolios

Smart Services are digital, IT-based services that are using data of a corresponding physical product, e.g. predictive maintenance or automated reordering of consumables for a production machine. This contribution shows a study about 265 services from the German manufacturing industry. We derive hypothesis for identifying Smart Services as well as eleven variables and their 47 characteristics to systematically describe them. A clustering of the found Smart Services resulted in four distinguishable groups. Furthermore, we show statistics of how companies combine the characteristics of their market offerings. Our findings reflect where the theoretical possibilities were fully met by the implementations of the German manufacturing companies and where the industry is still lagging behind. Finally, we derived six bundles of highly consistent combinations of the characteristics. These bundles can be starting points for developing Smart Services for one’s specific use case.