Abstract
Industrial services are increasingly becoming more relational and customer-oriented, due to manufacturers’ adoption of servitisation approaches and product service system offerings. Challenges remain regarding the effective design and delivery of these new offerings, and the understanding of their actual value for both providers and customers. This work focuses on one specific type of product service systems in the context of manufacturing equipment: result-oriented or performance-based services, which aim at delivering an outcome rather than selling the equipment to the customer. A proposal of a value-driven method for their design that engages the customer in the process is presented. This new method has been applied to a real industrial life setting through an application case, involving the service provider and its customer, and targeting manufacturing equipment within customers’ plant. Results indicate the effectiveness of this prescriptive approach. Reported benefits from participants refer to its flexibility, adaptability and applicability for different types of equipment, as well as its potential to help providing a modular service portfolio adequate to equipment specific context and requirements.
Highlights
Creating value by adding services to products is at the core of the servitisation strategy (Vandermerwe and Rada 1988)
The collaborative research with the case companies was conducted as an intervention or application case that observed the principles of free academic investigation, e.g., free interviewing, confidentiality, controlled design and creation of new empirical material, and of joint and continuous monitoring (Hatchuel and David, 2008)
The monitoring was done by the senior researcher in the team and the service provider executive manager who oversaw the implementation of the steps
Summary
Creating value by adding services to products is at the core of the servitisation strategy (Vandermerwe and Rada 1988). On some occasions, delivering a high value PSS implies the manufacturer taking over process responsibility and ensuring a certain result or level of performance to the customer (Matthyssens and Vandenbempt 2010) This change of focus from the sale of equipment to the outcome of equipment use is a commonly acknowledged feature of a particular type of contracts or services named under several terms, e.g., functional products, integrated solutions, performance-based contracts, result-oriented PSS and advanced services (Grubic and Jennions 2018). The design of result-oriented PSS or performance-based services requires a high level of flexibility due to their high degree of customisation to adapt to varying customer needs (Reim et al, 2015; Batista et al, 2016) This flexibility is seldom exploited in engineering design approaches for PSS (Brambila-Macias et al, 2018) while a recent review study by Cong et al (2020) highlights the remaining challenge on adaptability to different contexts.
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a callDisclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.
