Fourth Industrial Revolution, Digital Servitization and Relationship Quality in Italian B2B Manufacturing Firms. An Exploratory Study

Purpose–Industry 4.0 is dramatically affecting businesses behaviours and strategies, transforming productsdesign, manufacture, operations and services. An outcome of this transformation is digital servitization. Thispaper aims to contribute to the extant literature about digital servitization in B2B contexts by analysing howI4.0-based servitization affects the quality of supplier–customer relationships.Design/methodology/approach–The authors adopted a qualitative methodology based on an exploratorymultiple case study. In particular, the study included 22 Italian B2B manufacturing firms whose I4.0-baseddigital servitization approaches are described and, then, analysed in relation to the quality of supplier–customer relationships.Findings–The access to customers and data is critical to enable advanced digital services and for improvingrelationship quality; the levels of relational intimacy and informational openness lead to two subsequent levelsof data-driven efficiency and data-driven effectiveness, impacting significantly on relationship quality andenabling relational innovation.Originality/value–The research explores the link, so far underestimated, between digital servitization andrelationship quality in industrial contexts.