Renewing the sawmill industry: studies on innovation, customer value and digitalization

The sawmill industry’s current business strategies are based on traditional, productionoriented business logic. However, the ruling sources of competitiveness (lower prices and higher production volumes) are no longer sufficient to maintain the industry’s profitability. A shift from manufacturing to service economy includes vast potential to improve customer value and, hence, business performance. The service view suggests that instead of being created by production, customer value derives from processes in which the provider supports the customer’s value creation. This view positions the customer at the core of the business and challenges prevailing business approaches within traditional industries. The goal of this thesis is to explore the sawmill industry’s business transformation toward customer orientation and service-based business. As firms do not operate in isolation from their surrounding business environment, the entire wood products industry is considered. Service logic was used as the research frame to accentuate the value-based business approach. The novelty of this thesis is applying customer orientation to improve the forest industry’s innovation and competitiveness. Digitalization is a core of innovation and offers potential to take customer orientation to a new level. Therefore, two closely connected concepts with customer orientation, innovation and digitalization, were also studied. Both interviews and case studies were used, comprising a total of 36 semi-structured interviews. This thesis suggests that by positioning customers at the core of the business and by applying service-based business practices, the sawmill industry is in better position to achieve longterm competitiveness. This idea, however, necessitates significant strategic changes, questioning existing practices and principles of the entire wood products industry. The first step in the change toward a customer-oriented business (i.e., service-based business) is to gain more understanding of customer orientation and embrace this approach as an organization-wide attitude, not only within the sawmill industry, but throughout wood value chains.