Product Line Engineering for Digital Product‐Services

Abstract

ABSTRACTDigitizing the value chain brings along new business opportunities to organizations wishing to adopt a service‐oriented approach. This trend, referred to as digital transformation, has taken over the business world in recent years. Digital technologies allow a company to move towards outcome‐based commitments, pricing, and contracts with its customers. However, these technologies can also make product portfolio management more challenging. Whereas transforming a product offering into a product‐service offering through digitization does not in itself revolutionize product line systems engineering processes and methods, it is of the utmost importance to consider this transformation concerns more than a new culture or using new technology and requires, first and foremost, an alignment with an organization's global strategy and structure.In this paper, we present a conceptual framework that helps define a high‐level strategy to implement a product‐service offer in an organization. The distinctive framework aspects include the Product‐Service Product Line or PSPL concept (a product line of product‐services), the elements to define the PSPL business model (pricing model, pricing metrics, and commitment types), a product‐services typology, and a product line engineering method extension for architecting the PSPL (notably, a specific service building block type to support a composable design approach and a feature model including service‐related, socio‐technical features).