Process characteristics of Product-Service Systems development: Comparison of seven manufacturing company cases

The process to develop a product-service system (PSS) from a product of a manufacturing company could take many different routes reflecting various properties of the manufacturing firm and its business contexts. This paper describes a method to represent PSS development processes using service blue-prints. PSS development activities of various stakeholders, including servitization experts, manufacturing company people, customers and other collaborators, are described with their progress sequence and relations. To support understanding and comparison of different PSS development cases, simple measures for process characteristics have also been devised. Seven PSS development cases for various kinds of manufacturing companies are compared from the process perspectives obtained from the proposed representation so that the utilities of the proposed representation are illustrated. (C) 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Automated summary

This paper introduces a method to represent PSS development processes using service blueprints, describing the activities of various stakeholders and comparing seven PSS development cases for different manufacturing companies to illustrate the utility of the proposed representation.