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The aim of the paper is analysis the linkages between the types of services (product-centric and knowledge-centric services) that steel service centres deliver to their customers and key network capabilities required. Many firms operating in mature industries as steel or petrochemicals are today facing increased global competition, especially from low-cost producers. Increased competition has forced many traditional industrial firms to upgrade their offerings to more specialized and customized products. Hence, firms are shifting their focus from production to other areas, such as services, logistics, business development - increasing number of services in their portfolios. There is a potential area for growth and revenue generation (e.g. due to the added value the service component provides). This extension into new services has been referred to as “service infusion” or “servitization”. Manufacturing companies should focus more on improving customer perspectives by providing diversified value-added product–service offerings as well as developing close long-term partnership with customers. Buyer-supplier relationships are therefore critical for successfully providing services. Nonetheless, buyer–supplier relationships in servitized contexts have received little research attention until recently. The main research question is: what underlying organizational competences does a steel service centres (a supplier) need in order to enhance its capacity to create value proposition for their customers? To explore the causal relationships a DEMATEL technique is adopted. Using sample data from Polish steel service centres, this study finds that when moving from product-centric to knowledge-centric services, the technical information needed by a supplier should be coupled with an increasing degree of knowledge of customers. More specifically, empirical evidence suggests that steel service centres relies on network capabilities such as: customer-oriented way of working, high quality and reliable operations, communication capabilities, negotiation capabilities, ability to engender trust and conflict management skills.
Keywords: Steel service centres, network capability, servitization, DEMATEL method, customer value© This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.