Servitization has been a major area of discussion within our industry for many years, but as we recover from the pandemic and enter the new normal, is servitization more important than ever? Or did the massive disruption we saw across recent years expose the dangers of outcome-based service models?

In some ways, perhaps servitization in our industry is more imperative than ever before. The one thing that the pandemic created was a need for closer working relationships between service providers and their customers.

Suddenly, when all industries were facing unprecedented new challenges as the world locked down in response to the pandemic, the need for closer integration across business ecosystems was laid fully bare for all to see.

In a sense, the pandemic, having brought service providers and their customers closer, has meant the path towards servitization has been made even more urgent.

This approach of closer integration allowed us to embrace a more meaningful way of working together, which offered a more tangible view into what the growing shift to servitization that has been building as an industrial movement across the last decade might look like.

Yet, there is a flip side.

Servitization is often closely aligned with what many see as its ultimate end point – outcome-based services.

However, it was amongst those industries that had moved almost entirely into an outcome-based service approach that there was perhaps the most significant economic anguish experienced during the pandemic.

In sectors where there had been a move to a pay-per-x model, the sudden abrupt shutdown of industry for months at a time left many service providers exposed to major revenue declines.

With this in mind, Field Service News Research felt it was an important time to reassess the appetite in the industry to understand if the pandemic was seen as the catalyst for us to embrace servitization or, instead, an indication that we had pushed too far away from a break-fix status quo.

Either way, it is time for us to pause and reflect on the most pragmatic steps forward for our industry.

In this the first report from this current study we explore:

• Did the pandemic kill servitization or make it inevitable?
• Is the movement towards servitization growing?
• The alignment of servitization and outcome-based services 
• What are the drivers for developing servitization offerings?
• The processes and time frames for establishing servitization 
• How is servitization being implemented? 
• Does servitization require internal structure changes? 
• What technology is empowering servitization? 

This exclusive research report, sponsored by HSO, it is now available for a limited period on our FSN FREE subscription. If you are yet to subscribe to you can do so now in less than a minute and access this paper and all other content available on FSN FREE instantly.