The Influence Of Information Technology On Industrial Services In The Manufacturing Industry – A Literature Review And Future Research Directions

In the last 40 years, industrial organizations have optimised their production processes through information technology (IT). Nowadays, manufacturing firms are confronted with shrinking margins, service-demanding customers, and increased competition that are associated with the structural shift from a product-dominant to a service-dominant economy. In order to answer the changed market conditions, those firms started to offer industrial product-service systems that refer to customer life cycle oriented combinations of products and services realised in an extended value-creation network. Since enterprise information systems (IS) are designed and optimised for production planning, a clear lack in functionality and integration for industrial services can be ascertained. In particular, the life cycle management for product-service systems is not adequately covered in current standard software solutions. Firms heavily rely on individual software instead. Due to the cross-disciplinary field of research, it is important to have an overview of the extant literature. Therefore, we present a structured literature review grounded in an established literature review framework. The results suggest that extant literature lacks depth in covering the specificity of industrial services in IT solutions supporting life cycle management. We propose further research in requirements engineering, IT architecture, IT infrastructure, IT governance, and sourcing