A Digital Maturity Model for Electronics Manufacturing Firms Toward Servitization with Integrated Approach

The growth speed of top trending for global firms, the digital transformation (DT), has become steadier than ever by the advancement of digital technologies as well as the COVID-19 pandemic. In order to implement a digital evolutional path appropriately, the Digital Maturity Model (DMM) has been seen as a handy tool since they help companies evaluate their initial states and plan development road maps. So far, several DMMs have been developed for both cross-industry and/or specific sectors, including manufacturing. However, none of them is developed for the Electronics Industry (EI) firms despite the vital importance of the EI sector, especially in developing countries like Vietnam. These companies contribute a significant proportion of Vietnam’s GDP, up to 40% in 2021. Moreover, none of them guide EI firms to embrace the Servitization model. This article presents a new DMM to digitally transform EI companies to align with the Servitization model by applying both the Product Service System (PPS) and Service Design approach. The DMM is developed with on the design science research methodology and uses its strategy of combining related models to form a new one to gain high quality. Experts from a joint-venture telecom equipment company under VNPT, the biggest telecommunication service provider in Vietnam, were chosen to join the DMM pre-evaluation phase of the development process. For further research, the authors expected that the newly developed DMM should be transferred and evaluated by more EI incumbent firms and then become a standardized DMM for the EI sector.