• manufacturing
• servitization

Over the last twenty years several leading manufacturing companies like Rolls-Royce Plc, IBM and General Electric, managed to successfully change their offerings, becoming integrated solutions providers. At first these companies started to enhance their offerings by developing product support services as add-ons. The second step was the development of broad after sales services. The third and final step involved a whole new effort in reorganising the companies towards the implementation of product-service systems PSS (Rada and Vandermerwe, 1988; Oliva and Kallenberg, 2003; Davies, 2003). Rada and Vandermerwe (1988) termed this movement “the servitization of business”. As result of this process, manufacturers have been pushed downstream in the value chain in order to retain more value flow inside their operations