Segment 1: Building the foundations

This is the first of the 11 segments to build your Digital Servitization pathway. It is the base for all the other segments.

On the Digital Servitization map, this foundational segment covers the first levels of the value proposition (enabling base and product) and the first two roles of digitalization (generating information and supporting end customer operations).

The position of the segment in the Digital Servitization map.

Why this segment

This is the natural starting point of almost every Digital Servitization pathway.

By implementing this segment, you will be able to:

• Manage your connected products at scale

  This is important to deliver, without friction, the value-added digital services that will follow. If the management of your connected products is weak, every new service will be slowed down by problems with data, connectivity, or provisioning.

• Offer a first digital service to your customers (usually for free)

  This is essential to start the data flywheel: the more value your customers receive, the more data they share with you. The more data you have, the more value you can offer in return. At this foundational stage, the first service can be as simple as a Digital Product Passport or remote monitoring and control for your product. What matters is that it gives customers a concrete benefit, and therefore a good reason to share their product data with you.

• Get visibility into your whole installed base, including unconnected products

  Even though a digital servitization journey typically starts with connected products, extending the view to the unconnected installed base helps estimate the reachable potential of the digital service business and plan the next steps. Segmenting this potential by product model, product age, geographic region, or customer size makes both the estimate and the planning even more actionable.

• Gain insights into how your products are actually used

  This helps you find opportunities to seize when designing your digital service offering, for example by understanding which features customers use most, how often they use your products, and where they need support. It also helps your R&D department improve the design of new products, enabling a virtuous collaboration between product design and service design.

• Support regulatory compliance

  This is essential to avoid the risk of fines or litigation and, above all, to earn the trust of your customers.

Key capabilities of the DPS system for this segment

To support these goals, the DPS system should provide the following capabilities.

1. Connected product management

The DPS system manages the lifecycle of your connected products, from factory registration to provisioning and end-customer activation. It seamlessly handles multiple product models, each with different data sources, formats, and logic, in a single system, and it scales as your connected installed base grows.

2. Operational monitoring and remote control for end customers

The DPS system provides your end customers with a web portal or a mobile app to monitor the operating status, alerts, and telemetry data of your products. Where technically feasible and safe, they can also control the products remotely.

3. Installed base and end-customer mapping

The DPS system keeps all the information about your installed base in one place, as a single source of truth: every product, connected or unconnected, with its location and its end customer.

4. Product data record (or Digital Product Passport, DPP)

The DPS system maintains a record for each product, including identification details, bill of materials, specifications, installation and commissioning data, service history, warranty, and documentation. This applies to both connected and unconnected products.

5. Data-driven insights into product usage across the entire installed base

The DPS system presents you with a clear, aggregated view of how customers actually use your products. Dashboards and charts support the analysis of indicators such as utilization rate, working hours, and most frequent programs, which can be segmented by, for example, product model, product age, geographic region, or customer size.

6. Regulatory compliance

The DPS system provides the system features and user interactions you need to support compliance with regulations such as:

• GDPR
• EU Data Act
• NIS2
• Cyber Resilience Act (CRA)
• EU Machinery Regulation
• Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation (ESPR)

Success criteria for this segment

*You should estimate the size of the reachable installed base at the very beginning of defining your pathway, for example by excluding products you consider too old or impossible to identify.