Product-Service Systems Representation With Product and Service Elements and a Case Study

Abstract

This paper proposes a new systematic methodology to schematically represent a Product-Service System (PSS) with product and service elements for effective PSS design. PSS consists of many product and service elements, which are innovatively connected with each other for satisfying customer needs. Therefore, in order to concretely realize a PSS concept, the detailed service and product elements should be properly defined, represented and configured. In this representation scheme, the service element contains service provider and receiver and their activities. In addition, several product elements are associated with a service element. These service elements and associated product elements are explored with the service blueprint method and PSS functional analysis. The concatenation of those many service and product elements is later conducted based on flows that are defined in the PSS function analysis. The case example is studied and it is demonstrated that this method can help to systematically identify critical service and product elements. In addition, alternative product elements and their configuration to be associated with same service element can be easily conceived and compared with the proposed methodology.