Life cycle oriented design of technical Product-Service Systems

Technical services such as maintenance, retrofitting, refurbishing or user training can significantly influence the economic and ecologic performance if high quality investment goods, thus providing new and advanced user benefits. In order to systematically exploit these potentials the interrelations between physical products and non-physical services need to be considered proactively, resulting in the necessity for integrating corresponding product and service design processes. For this reason, a process for the systematic design of product related technical services is introduced that upon its modularization represents a promising starting point for linkage with corresponding product design processes. Life cycle oriented design of technical Product-Service Systems is thus supported. The presented concept is finally illustrated by means of an example from the investment goods industry. (c) 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.