Open Access

Gerhard Gudergan, Achim Buschmeyer, Boris Alexander Feige, Denis Krechting, Stefan Bradenbrink, Ralph Mutschler

• Two major trends are driving many companies in the manufacturing industry to rethink and reconfigure their business logic: the trends towards applying a service dominant business logic, and the trends towards collecting and using information about the market life cycle of products. The pursuit of market lifecycle information has lately been one that is driven mostly by tremendous developments in the area of the Internet of Things and information system integration. Companies in the manufacturing industry are reconfiguring their value chains, tending towards a higher degree of service orientation. This transformation requires an understanding of the principles behind offering additional value through industrial product service systems. The design of an adequate information architecture and the subsequent management model are the key factors for a successful implementation. This article focuses on how information gathering, analysis, and the meaningful use of information have been linked to the success of those companies within the German manufacturing industry which have made the transformation towards service-orientation. On the basis of an empirical study, five success factors with a significant impact on either innovation performance and/or operational performance are identified. These findings are enhanced to derive guidelines for an adequate information architecture. The guidelines are underpinned by best practices of prosperous companies with a strong product-service-orientation. Links between best practice application and performance are analyzed, and significant relations are identified.