Introduction to Service 4.0 and Customer-Centric Supply Chains

This chapter explores cutting-edge digital technologies that drive the transformation of supply chains (SC) into customer-centric frameworks, aligning with the Industry 4.0 paradigm. Numerous terms have been coined in recent years, such as Banking 4.0, Healthcare 4.0, Construction 4.0, and Quality 4.0, by repackaging different innovative digital technologies. This chapter will focus on understanding the relevance of these innovative digital technologies in the Service 4.0 context. This is an important and timely topic, as the rate of digitization is accelerated with significant disruptions to business models due to the pandemic and technological advancements [1]. For instance, COVID-19 accelerated the trend toward the digitalization of business models, shifting commercial activities from predominantly offline and brick-and-mortar outlets to online outlets. This also presented opportunities for SCs to redefine the value proposition to promote customer-centric supply chains (CCSCs) of the future by enabling personalized customer experience, delivery flexibility, on-demand product differentiation, improved coordination, traceability, end-to-end visibility, etc. Focusing on knowledge management for optimal service delivery, logistics optimization, predictive analytics for service support, communication automation using bots and artificial intelligence (AI), and on-demand remote service delivery can lead to intelligent CCSC of the future setting up the Service 4.0 ecosystem. Service 4.0 can promote data-driven decisions in SCs through service identification, understanding demand patterns, improved predictive performance, and standardizing the service offering through customer segmentation.