Cost And Performance Measurement In Service-Oriented Business Models: An Exploratory Study

The globalization of markets, an increased awareness of consumers, and the technological innovation driven by the development of digital technologies have challenged the traditional strategies of firms and paved the way to the development of innovative ones. In this context, the process of servitization in manufacturing firms has attracted growing attention over the last years both among practitioners and scholars. Nevertheless, it has remained unexplored the role that the measurement of costs and performance can play to support the servitization. Therefore, the paper aims at contributing to this debate by studying the possible links between servitization strategies, identified through a servitization strategy matrix, and cost and performance measurement systems. This research is based on a cross- sectional study of a set of large, medium and small-sized manufacturing firms in Italy. The analysis of our findings has shown that there is still a prevalence of traditional cost and performance measurement tools although there is evidence that a broader set of information can foster the decision-making and facilitate strategic decisions concerning servitization.