Recent economic transformations have forced companies to redefine their value propositions, increasing traditional product offerings with supplementary services—the so-called Product-Service System (PSS). Among them, the adoption of Industry 4.0 technologies is very common. However, the directions that companies are undertaking to offer new value to their customers in the Industry 4.0 have not yet been investigated in detail. Based on a focus group, this paper contributes to this understanding by identifying the main trajectories that would shape a future scenario in which PSS and Industry 4.0 would merge. In addition, future research directions addressing (a) the transformation of the PSS value chain into a PSS ecosystem, (b) the transformation inside a single company towards becoming a PSS provider, and (c) the digital transformation of the traditional PSS business model are identified.
In today's increasingly competitive markets, a growing number of traditional manufacturing companies, whose core business hinged for decades on providing products to the customers, are attempting to move towards a Product-Service-System (PSS) business model, enlarging their value proposition by providing services in addition to their products (Kowalkowski et al. 2015). The advantages and the benefits claimed in the introduction of a PSS business model have been discussed from several points of view (Braax and Visintin 2017). Greater differentiation from competitors and the possibility to 'lock-in' customers and 'lock-out' competitors (Neely 2008) together with the enhancement to a more efficient sustainable offering (Tukker 2015) are probably the most appealing.Nevertheless, the shift from a traditional product-oriented to an innovative PSS-based business model poses relevant challenges: traditional companies embarking in the servitization process have to review their entire organization, facing different levels of risks and uncertainties (Neely 2008;Ng and Yip 2009;Song, 2017). Indeed, PSS entails dynamic interactions among the tangible and intangible components of the PSS, namely the product, the service(s), the customer(s), the provider(s) and the entire infrastructure (Phumbua and Tjahjono 2012) that are complex to design and monitor. Therefore, at least two crucial steps to support companies in this transition can be identified: i) the design of proper PSSs in terms of product and service components, and ii) the assessment of the PSS during the design phases in terms of performance perceived by the customers, company efficiency and effectiveness, and environmental performance (Chou, Chen, and Conley 2015). However, models and tools specifically supporting the development of sustainable PSSs are still lacking (Vasantha et al. 2012). The adoption of models based on the PSS culture, as well as new design, assessment and costing methods, is depicted as one of the internal barriers to success during the implementation of a sustainable PSS business model (Vezzoli et al. 2015). Indeed, companies need to carry on with their traditional product design approach and, concurrently, they have to integrate it with proper service design activities as a mean to develop a marketable PSS.This study aims at contributing to the PSS research field suggesting a method to design and assess the PSS service component: the service provision process. This method must be then integrated with traditional product engineering methods in order to design the final PSS solution. More in detail, the work proposes the adoption of Business Process Simulation (BPS) to support the design and assessment of the PSS's service provision process according to three main key indicators defined as crucial: performance perceived by the customers, company efficiency, and environmental performance.The paper is structured as follows: Section 2 reports an analysis about the main critical features of the sustainable PSS provision process that require the ...
Manufacturing companies are increasingly moving toward delivering combinations of products and services to provide higher value to their customers. The development of such Product Service Systems (PSS) escalates in complexity when several products developed by different suppliers need to be integrated into a unique system. For first tier suppliers, it is a great challenge to model and simulate the impact of changing design variables at the micro-level on both hardware properties and governing behaviors of services over the entire life-cycle of the PSS. The paper describes a model-based approach developed to estimate the life cycle cost of a PSS hardware already at a concept design stage. The proposed approach computes the relative cost efficiency of a set of design variants using as input the data generated by the simulations run in the Computer Aided Engineering (CAE) environment. The approach allows the exploration of the design space of a PSS given by the variation of the geometry of a Computer Aided Design (CAD) model, building on the computation of customized cost modules selected by a generic list of PSS cost dimensions. For each evaluated design case, the model produces as output a unique monetary figure of the cost expected to incur by owning or using the asset throughout the lifetime. The work has been conducted in collaboration with a tier-one aerospace component manufacturer, and the application of the model is exemplified through a case study related to the development of a turbine rear structure (TRS) for commercial jet engines. The approach is most suitable for the development of complex systems in which new products and components are integrated into a shared product platform. The results are discussed in relation to the current literature on PSS cost engineering, highlighting challenges to be addressed to increase cost estimation accuracy and increase uncertainty identification and awareness.
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