Enterprises’ Servitization in the First Decade: Retrospective Analysis of Back-End and Front-End Challenges

The concept of servitization provides major benefits both for the performing company and for the profiting customer. Thus, during the last years many companies were heading for this well-proven direction tempted by expectations, but have been possibly even not aware of some inherent challenges. Since there are some issues even threatening the existence of companies, and some other rather easy to overcome, it is by all means necessary to consider and deal with this matter. Hence, this paper provides an insight into pitfalls in servitization named “service paradox” and addresses corresponding managerial issues. To operationalize the challenges of servitization, this paper suggests a separation
among internal back-end challenges and customer-facing front-end issues, which represents the applied framework for their examination. Besides, the matter of appropriate pricing and the inherent shift of risks towards suppliers are discussed. Finally, the last part concludes the analysis outputs and gives suggestions for the future strategies in the enterprise servitization.