Status review and research strategies on product-service supply chain

Abstract

This study draws a holistic view of the supply chain with three service strategies – namely, after-sales service; maintenance, repair and operations; and the product-service system – by analysing over 71 articles in this field. In this investigation, the content analysis is used to scrutinize the research to establish the knowledge, reveal the research opportunities and propose research strategies. The supply chain for product-service system depends more heavily on the implementation of the cooperation, collaboration and integration principles in operation. However, a complete analysis reveals that those crucial principles did not embody in current literature. Current research also failed to discuss the service operation decisions by modelling the intricate relations among them in a broad product-service supply chain context. Thus, the future research directions include developing service demand forecasting models; combining the time-series methods and the causal methods; establishing service resource planning models; addressing the relations between service deliverables, service capacity and the service resource; and strengthening the quantitative evaluation of the product-service supply chain performance with a systemic view. Moreover, by addressing the principles of cooperation, collaboration and integration, the added values of this review are the proposed research strategies for integrated forecasting of product services, integrated product-service resource allocation and scheduling, and systematic performance evaluation of the product-service supply chain. The findings and the proposed research strategies develop an in-depth understanding of product-service supply chain applications and serve as a basis for future research.