Designing sustainable product-service systems: A generic process model for the early stages

Abstract

The design of Product-Service Systems (PSS) in manufacturing companies has been widely researched over the past three decades, with contributions from various backgrounds. However, the multidisciplinary field led to the development of disparate approaches for PSS design, which furthermore deficiently include sustainability considerations. Such discord hinders PSS uptake in industry due to the unclarity of which process to use and crucial matters to consider. This paper aims to propose a generic process model to describe the early stage of the PSS design, which is the most influential phase for the success of the PSS offering throughout its life cycle, concerning the three dimensions of sustainability. The proposed generic process model addresses early-stage PSS design in three phases and considers seven clusters of entities through five activities. To achieve this aim, existing approaches for PSS design were identified through a systematic literature review, yielding a comprehensive overview of existing approaches distilled with respect to their content, the actions they propose and the sustainability principles they discuss. The systematic review was then followed by in-depth content analysis using widely adopted methodologies in design research and manufacturing companies for process decomposition and consequently synthesis, resulting in the proposed systematic generic process model for the early-stage design of sustainable PSS. The proposed process model was further examined concerning its use implications, limitations, and potential implementation steps.