A Service Engineering framework to design and configure Product-Service Systems

Abstract

Companies are striving to create new sources of value, providing integrated product-service solutions to customers, evolving from a “pure product” orientation towards a Product-Service System (PSS) perspective. In this context, Service Engineering (SE), the discipline concerned with the systematic development and design of product-services, is becoming a predominant field. Most of the available Service Engineering models, methods and tools come from traditional engineering, business and computer science approaches adapted to the Service System or Product-Service System. In order to fill this gap, this paper proposes a Service Engineering framework that integrates a product-service design modelling tool developed at the Tokyo Metropolitan University with a discrete event simulation test-bench, which enables the comparison of several PSS configurations and the evaluation of both customer and internal performance. A sample case is reported to better clarify the different phases of the framework implementation.