Supporting the Performance Assessment of Product-service Systems During the Use Phase

Abstract

Companies providing Product-Service Systems (PSS) can gain competitive advantages by addressing the customer needs in a more precise way than regular product manufacturer. However, achieving these benefits also increases the responsibility on the company's side because the value of a PSS is delivered during the use phase. In many cases a provider stays the owner of the PSS and is thus responsible for the performance during the use. Accordingly, the PSS provider acts not only as a manufacturer but also as a service provider, which requires a constant monitoring of the PSS performance (e.g., service availability or customer satisfaction). The implementation of a performance measurement system is an approach to cope with the additional responsibilities during the use phase. However, different publications exist that offer support for the development phase of PSS but the performance assessment during the use phase is not addressed sufficiently, even though the importance in mentioned by different authors. This paper thus proposes two generic processes to address the identified need for the performance assessment of PSS. The first process guides through the implementation of an entire performance measurement system, and the other process describes the development of PSS specific key performance indicators (KPIs). The proposed approach applies KPIs to a new context and supports PSS providers in implementing a performance measurement system, which allows them to initiate measure to increase the PSS performance.