Abstract
Industrial Product-Service Systems (IPS2) can provide insights to enhance the environmental sustainability and lower environmental impact. However, its successful realisation for preventing the production of waste, while increasing efficiencies in the uses of energy and human capital remains a highly convoluted problem. This research article aims to address this issue by presenting an innovative uncertainty-based framework that can be used to assist in achieving increased sustainability within the context of IPS2. The developed framework explains the drivers for decision-making and cost to enable sustainability improvements in transforming to industrial services. This is based on academic literature, and multiple case studies of seven industrial companies with over 30 h of semi-structured interviews. The validation of the framework through two case studies demonstrates that uncertainty management can enable resource efficiency and offer sustainable transformation to service provision.
Highlights
Sustainability involves maintaining change in a balanced manner, in which the exploitation of resources, investment plans, the technological development and institutional change all need to be in harmony, while meeting both current and future potential to meet human, organisational needs and aspirations (Global footprint, 2018)
The analysis presented in the following sub-sections is structured to demonstrate how uncertainty management in both case studies had an impact on the cost, EADS% and the confidence in delivering the projects
At the 80 percentile level the cost figure £78,800 k and the EADS % at risk is 1.91%. These results shows that, compared to Scenario 1 at the same level of confidence, the implementation of uncertainty management has resulted in a reduction in cost and an improvement in the performance outcome with the EADS % at risk figure
Summary
Sustainability involves maintaining change in a balanced manner, in which the exploitation of resources, investment plans, the technological development and institutional change all need to be in harmony, while meeting both current and future potential to meet human, organisational needs and aspirations (Global footprint, 2018). For many in the field, sustainability is defined through interconnecting considerations for environment, economic and social (EPA, 2018). The route to achieve it is not always clear. This is because the complexities and subjectivities, associated with socio technical systems that over time face changing requirements and dynamics, make it difficult to be universally accepted. A major challenge in this process is with managing uncertainties that affect our plans for achieving environmental, economic and social targets.
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