After-sales services and aftermarket support: a systematic review, theory and future research directions

After-sales and aftermarkets are significant revenue streams for industrial companies. After-sales services are activities during warranty periods that include field technical assistance, spare parts distribution, customer care, and accessories sale. Aftermarket support involves secondary market transactions for additional products (e.g. accessories and add-ons) and product recovery processes. An awareness of the potentials of both concepts is evident by the extensive body of production and operations management (POM) publications that investigate the perspectives of both academia and practitioners. Yet, there is an absence of a systematic review to analyse research studies on after-sales and aftermarkets in a POM context. This article reviews the POM literature on after-sales services and aftermarket support. The review identifies and critically appraises 249 peer-reviewed articles published between 1970 and 2018. It examines the research clusters, investigated industry sectors, research methodologies, theories and contributions of studies. Using insights from the review process, the article also proposes theoretical foundations, sets a research agenda, and identifies optimisation problems for future after-sales and aftermarket studies.