Understanding service complexity in manufacturing companies: Insights and implications from a mixed methods study on drivers and levers of complexity

Expanding industrial service offerings is an essential growth and diversification strategy for manufacturing companies. However, the unstructured development of service portfolios introduces complexity drivers into organizations and presents new challenges in providing services efficiently and flexibly. This paper explores service complexity in manufacturing companies and evaluates levers for complexity management approaches. Applying an exploratory sequential mixed methods design, complexity drivers are qualitatively identified and clustered into complexity categories. The effect of these complexity categories on the efficiency and flexibility of the service provision is then quantitatively explored via an online survey. Correlation analysis reveals substantial interrelations among task complexity (0.61), service program complexity (0.49), and the complexity of service, support, and customer processes (0.48), highlighting these as most critical to efficiency in successful service provision. This study enables companies to assess and mitigate service complexity by identifying the key pain points for implementing complexity management measures.