A study related to product service systems (PSS), SERVQUAL and knowledge management system (KMS) – A review

Abstract

PSS is a growing field of research in industry practice in today's global economy. It is a new trend that has an impact on both the production and consumption of resources. PSS aims at a more profitable and conservational usage of products. While in the past providing services was one of the strategies attained to differentiate in competition, however today providing a product together with many services has become a standard practice in the product industry. To remain competitive, manufacturers are forced not only to produce a competitive product however rather a superior PSS.PSS are outlined as life cycle bound combinations of a product and completely different services, having sophisticated networks, that comprise a manufacturer as a provider and also as a repair partner. To enable the applicability of a PSS in an industry, it is essential to evaluate the system using metrics – the SERVQUAL MODEL, which defines “The quality as the difference between the customers' expectations & perceptions concerning the services delivered to them” [1]. It is catered to measure quality by capturing the expectancy – confirmation paradigm which suggests the consumer's perceived quality of how well a given service delivery meets their expectations of that delivery. So this SERVQUAL metric is used to determine the level of quality in the industry and the five dimensions are such as tangibility, reliability, responsiveness, assurance & empathy are measured using a five-point Likert scale. Since, organizations are more and more moving towards knowledge-based strategies, developing and managing knowledge is essential for improving the organizational performance as well as for enhancing decision-making process. This paper presents a review on the use of a knowledge management practice in PSS for industries to store, share and utilize knowledge for enhancing creativity & innovation in their service systems. An efficient review of the literature has been conducted in the academic and scientific databases taking into account the date of publication of the articles titled PSS, SERVQUAL and KMS from 2009 to 2020. To achieve the review process, all selected articles have been categorized by publication year, the objectives of the research, the methodology used, the results, conclusion and future scope of their research are presented on a broader scale [16]. Therefore, this paper presents an overview of the literature on PSS and the evaluation methods using SERVQUAL MODEL and the role of knowledge management in PSS and the appropriate ideas for conducting research in the future.