A Product Service-System (PSS) is an integrated combination of products and services. This western concept embraces a service led competitive strategy, environmental sustainability, and the basis to differentiate from competitors who simply offer lower priced products. This paper aims to report the state-of-the-art of PSS research by presenting a clinical review of literature currently available on this topic. The literature is classified and the major outcomes of each study are addressed and analysed.On this basis, this paper defines the PSS concept, reports on its origin and features, gives examples of applications along with potential benefits and barriers to adoption, summarises available tools and methodologies, and identifies future research challenges. AbstractA Product Service-System (PSS) is an integrated combination of products and services. This western concept embraces a service led competitive strategy, environmental sustainability, and the basis to differentiate from competitors who simply offer lower priced products. This paper aims to report the state-of-the-art of PSS research by presenting a clinical review of literature currently available on this topic. The literature is classified and the major outcomes of each study are addressed and analysed.On this basis, this paper defines the PSS concept, reports on its origin and features, gives examples of applications along with potential benefits and barriers to adoption, summarises available tools and methodologies, and identifies future research challenges.

Purpose: This paper presents a framework that will help manufacturing firms to configure their internal production and support operations to enable effective and efficient delivery of products and their closely associated services.Design/methodology/approach: First we establish the key definitions and literature sources directly associated with servitization of manufacturing. We then develop a theoretical framework that categorises the key characteristics of a manufacturer's operations strategy, this is populated using both evidence from the extant literature and empirical data.Findings: The framework captures a set of operations principles, structures and processes which can guide a manufacturer in the delivery of product-centric servitized offering. These are illustrated and contrasted against operations that deliver purely product (production operations) and those which deliver purely services (services operations).Limitations/implications: The work is based on a review of the literature supported by data collected from an exploratory case study. Whilst it provides an essential platform, further research will be needed to validate our framework.Originality: The principal contribution of this paper is a framework which captures the key characteristics of operations for product-centric servitized manufacture.

This discussion paper aims to set out the key challenges and opportunities emerging from distributed manufacturing (DM). We begin by describing the concept, available definitions and consider its evolution where recent production technology developments (such as additive and continuous production process technologies), digitisation together with infrastructural developments (in terms of IoT and big-data) provide new opportunities.To further explore the evolving nature of DM, the authors, each of whom are involved in specific applications of DM research, examined within a workshop environment emerging DM applications involving new production and supporting infrastructural technologies. This paper presents these generalizable findings on DM challenges and opportunities in terms of products, enabling production technologies, and the impact on the wider production and industrial system. Industry structure and location of activities are examined in terms of the democrat impact on participating network actors.The paper concludes with a discussion on the changing nature of manufacturing as a result of DM, from the traditional centralised, large scale, long lead-time forecast driven production operations, to a new DM paradigm where manufacturing is a decentralised, autonomous near end-user driven activity. A forward research agenda is proposed that considers the impact of DM on the industrial and urban landscape.

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PurposeThis paper seeks to examine the area of business process mining, providing an overview of state‐of‐the‐art techniques. An outline of the main problems experienced in the practice of process mining is given along with reference to work that addresses the most challenging issues experienced in this field. This paper also aims to examine the application of soft computing techniques to process‐mining problems.Design/methodology/approachThis paper is based on a comprehensive review of literature covering more than 50 research papers. These papers are analysed to identify current trends and future research directions in the field.FindingsProcess‐mining techniques are now becoming available as graphical interface‐driven software tools, where flow diagram representations of processes may be manipulated as part of the mining task. A significant number of papers employ mining heuristics to aid in the task of process discovery. Soft computing algorithms are increasingly being investigated to aid the accuracy and speed of mining algorithms. Many papers exist that address common mining problems such as noise and mining loops. However, problems such as duplicate tasks, mining perspectives and delta analysis require further research.Originality/valueThe contribution of this paper is to provide a summary of the current trends in process‐mining practice and point out future research directions. A review of the work in this new and expanding area has been provided in the form of illustrative graphs and tables that identify the trends in this area. This is the most comprehensive and up‐to‐date review of business process‐mining literature.

Since it first appeared in literature in the early nineties, the Circular Economy (CE) has grown in significance amongst academic, policymaking, and industry groups. The latest developments in the CE field have included the interrogation of CE as a paradigm, and its relationship with sustainability and other concepts, including iterative definitions. Research has also identified a significant opportunity to apply circular approaches to our rapidly changing industrial system, including manufacturing processes and Industry 4.0 (I4.0) which, with data, is enabling the latest advances in digital technologies (DT). Research which fuses these two areas has not been extensively explored. This is the first paper to provide a synergistic and integrative CE-DT framework which offers directions for policymakers and guidance for future research through a review of the integrated fields of CE and I4.0. To achieve this, a Systematic Literature Review (SLR; n = 174) of the empirical literature related to digital technologies, I4.0, and circular approaches is conducted. The SLR is based on peer-reviewed articles published between 2000 and early 2018. This paper also summarizes the current trends in CE research related to manufacturing. The findings confirm that while CE research has been on the increase, research on digital technologies to enable a CE is still relatively untouched. While the “interdisciplinarity” of CE research is well-known, the findings reveal that a substantial percentage is engineering-focused. The paper concludes by proposing a synergistic and integrative CE-DT framework for future research developed from the gaps in the current research landscape.