Essential Areas of Action for the Smartification of Traditional Products and Services Considering the Capabilities of SMEs

One way for small and medium sized (SMEs) enterprises developing traditional physical products to follow the digital transformation is to smartify their products and develop smart services according to business or customer needs. The process to set up a smartification strategy for the first time covers many different organizational, human, technical and business process related aspects. With our research we provide a decision framework to support CEOs in identifying, which areas of action should be focused upon and enterprise-specifically further developed for the smartification of selected products. This paper derives the areas of action, which build the base for the decision framework’s underlying capability and maturity model.