Engineer-to-Order (ETO) companies deliver products designed according to specific customer requests, such as ships (Fincantieri), aircrafts (Leonardo), plants (Saipem) or machinery (Tetra Pak). ETO companies are increasingly shifting from selling mere products to offering integrated bundles of products and services (e.g., maintenance, spare parts, training), known as Product Service Systems (PSS). This process, known as servitization, comes with several managerial challenges, especially when dealing with the new services enabled by digital technologies, such as remote monitoring.

The purpose of this project is to study the challenges of the digital servitization “journey” and the possible ways to overcome them, by relating them to the characteristics of the supply chains of  ETO companies and their different digital servitization levels.

The work will use the (retrospective) expert interviews methodology. After reading the relevant literature, the student(s) will develop a preliminary conceptual framework, to be later fine-tuned and validated by interviewing managers of ETO companies. Interviews will be focused on collecting anecdotes and other information about challenges and solutions experienced by managers in the past.

The work can be strucutred either as a dissertation (i.e., with discussant, max. 7 points) or as a thesis (i.e., without discussant, max. 4 points), depending on the commitment of the student(s). It can be performed either individually or in couple.