Abstract
Product-Service Systems (PSS), if properly designed and implemented, represent a promising approach to sustainability. However, there is a number of organisational, cultural and regulatory barriers that hinder the widespread PSS implementation. In this paper, the authors investigated Distributed Manufacturing (DM) as a promising production model which can be applied to PSS to address some of its implementation barriers and improve its sustainability. To that end, existing PSS implementation barriers were collected and coupled with systematically analysed favourable DM features to describe a set of PSS+DM near-future scenarios, addressing the complete PSS lifecycle. Scenarios were then integrated into the PSS+DM Design Tool aiming to support idea generation for PSS implementation. The tool was tested with students, PSS and/or DM experts, manufacturing companies and design practitioners through two rounds of workshops in order to evaluate its completeness, effectiveness and usability and define recommendations for improvements. Based on the results, the improved final version of the PSS+DM Design Tool was developed, presenting the potential to support idea generation to improve sustainable PSS implementation through integrating DM features in each PSS lifecycle stage.
Highlights
The ever-changing global business environment nowadays requires companies to adopt differentiation strategies in order to stay competitive and attract customers
Product-Service System (PSS), which is described as an integrated offering combined of tangible products and intangible services designed to fulfil final customer needs [1,2], enables companies to differentiate their offers through the integration of products and services [3]
The aim of the research presented in this paper is to develop an idea generation tool to be used to support the design of PSS offerings
Summary
The ever-changing global business environment nowadays requires companies to adopt differentiation strategies in order to stay competitive and attract customers. An appropriately designed PSS offering has the potential to provide companies with competitive advantage, build strong relationship with customers and, at the same time, improve production processes and consumption patterns towards environmental sustainability [4,5]. The implementation of PSS offerings requires companies to redesign their business processes and value chains as well as acquire different competences, creating a number of obstacles for companies to overcome [6,7]. Authors investigate Distributed Manufacturing (DM) as a promising production model which can be applied to PSS to address some of its implementation barriers. DM is defined as a network of small-scale production units equipped with advanced manufacturing technologies, which facilitate localised and individualised production [11,12,13]
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