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For a number of years, an increase in manufacturing-related service activities being provided by third parties rather than “in-house” departments has been observed. This trend appears to be strengthening in the context of the Industry 4.0 landscape. The purpose of this paper is to investigate in what sense and at what rate the domain of manufacturing in the UK is transitioning into a major service-oriented field and what types of manufacturing-related activities are most/least suitable for future servitization. Hence, the paper addresses the following questions: i) To what extent has Servitization been adopted in the UK? – What impact is Industry 4.0 currently making? ii) What types of services are currently being offered as a result of industry 4.0? iii) What pros/cons/opportunities/threats does Industry 4.0 bring to British Servitization? – What wider economic issues will make an impact? The research summarized in this paper presents an answer to the outlined questions and draws conclusions as to how this field may further develop in future. The main contributions of this research are the closing of a critical gap in literature by investigating the relationships between the two fields of Servitization and Industry 4.0, and the creation of a framework to allow companies to make themselves aware of Industry 4.0-related services, whilst ensuring these new service innovations are offered in-line with their current business model.
Huxtable et al. (Fri,) studied this question.