Procurement of Advanced Services Within the Domain of Servitization: Preliminary Results of a Systematic Literature Review

The development of smart services for business to business applications enabled by digital technologies is on the rise. Services can become very complex in industrial applications; many actors are involved in their development, and value propositions often reflect complexity by addressing many beneficiaries. The challenge of pricing services is still prioritized in service-science because services are often intangible, therefore not as easy to price. With complex value systems emerging from advanced services, it is even harder to describe their value. When developing services, strong emphasis is put on understanding ecosystems and customer needs to create compelling value propositions. The key question for service sales is how much value the offering should capture? The pricing of services can be cumbersome and should be consistent with the value proposition: the promise to solve the customer’s defined problems. To maximize value for the customer, the offering should not be under- or over-scoped with features of limited usefulness. Every actor in the buying process has a different view on value, and different situations create different amounts of value. For sales, this is where a careful analysis is essential. But how are the services for industrial applications bought, and how is the value of a service assessed by a customer? Are there any differences between the stated value proposition and the perceived value proposition? This paper aims to investigate models and concepts from literature on assessing the value of services from the buyer’s perspective, comparing them to existing sales models.