Integrated Product Service Offerings Research Articles

An Integrated Design Framework for Virtual Enterprise-Based Customer-Oriented Product-Service Systems

Product Service System (PSS) design has been witnessed to achieve tremendous progress in recent years. Researchers and practitioners have proposed many frameworks to deal with variety of challenges along PSS lifecycle. However, despite the common sense of four fundamental constituent components of PSS-products, services, supported network and supported infrastructures, majority of them only focus on collaborative design of products and services, and few of them attach importance to supported network. The framework we proposed in this paper introduces the Three-Dimensional Concurrent Engineering (3DCE), which is widely recognized in product design field, into PSS design, in order to achieve the integrated product service offerings, processes and supported network design, hoping to bridge the gap of supported network design in a PSS. Meanwhile, this framework adopts Virtual Enterprise (VE) as a manifestation of supported network in order to provide the system with variety of skills, resources and supported infrastructures in an effective and dynamic way. What’s more, due to the increasing significances of customers, this framework takes both customers’ requirements and providers’ requirements into consideration, and is dedicated to address a win-win solution for both with the help of PSS design and assessment techniques.

Integrated product service offerings – Challenges in setting requirements

The objective of this paper is to explore what challenges exist when setting requirements for an Integrated Product Service Offering (IPSO). An IPSO, sometimes called Product Service System, is a concept with increased interest from manufacturing companies. It consists of a combination of products and services that, based on a life cycle perspective, have been integrated to fit targeted customer needs. In order to achieve a successful IPSO, it is important to collect aspects from many actors, something which sometimes is challenging for companies moving towards providing IPSOs.The four challenges found when setting requirements in IPSO development are; identification and inclusion of relevant aspects from relevant actors throughout the IPSO’s life cycle, understanding of the underlying aspects for all requirements for all elements of the offering, prioritization of requirements, and the difficulty to track how requirements affect each other between different elements in the IPSO.The methodology used to find these challenges was a combination of a structured literature review and an interview study at three manufacturing companies moving towards providing IPSOs.

A Literature Review to Understand the Requirements Specification's Role when Developing Integrated Product Service Offerings

This paper's objective is to analyze, based on a literature review, how existing IPSO design methods support and manage requirements when developing an IPSO. Issues analyzed are e.g. which types of aspects existing methods should consider, such as environmental issues and demands from stakeholders and customers. Another issue is what types of stakeholders are involved in the process. There is also an interest in finding out which of these methods are used in the industry. The goal is that the results will provide insight into how the requirements specification is used when developing an IPSO in theory, and in what way this insight will contribute to future studies on how companies currently derive and manage requirements when developing an IPSO.The literature review started out with the analysis of 201 papers, yielding 22 papers within the area of working with requirements for an IPSO. These papers were reviewed and summarized with the above issues and interests in mind. Findings are that when deriving requirements, existing IPSO design methods are lacking in regard to a holistic life cycle and system perspective of the offering. Few of the methods consider both requirements regarding the environmental impact of the offering and demands from all involved stakeholders, normally only the customer. Furthermore, few studies have ended with a clear work process regarding how to initially find the requirements to analyze them and later interpret them as actual metrics. There are also no signs that existing methodology is used in the industry's day-to-day work.

A method to improve integrated product service offerings based on life cycle costing

Although a few papers have reported on life cycle cost (LCC) analysis of integrated product service offerings (IPSOs), insight on how to improve IPSOs based on LCC analysis is missing. This paper presents a method and an Excel and MATLAB-based tool that support IPSO design by employing LCC analysis, both from the provider and customer perspectives. This method takes advantage of exchangeability between products and services, being enabled within IPSO design. The method has been applied to an existing IPSO and potential improvements have been identified, e.g. one cheap component causing high LCC that could be reduced significantly by redesign.

ProVa – Provider Value Evaluation for Integrated Product Service Offerings

Through the provision of integrated products and services, solution providers have more to gain than solely profit. This paper introduces the concept of provider value, which is novel in the area of integrated products and services. Further, a method is proposed (ProVa) to identify and evaluate the provider value of an integrated product service offering (IPSO) during the development process. ProVa allows for an assessment in terms of monetary value, but also with respect to other categories such as information and customer relations. In addition, aspects such as uncertainty and experience curve effects are considered.The functionality of ProVa is shown by application to a case in IPSO design.

Integrated Product Service Offerings for rail infrastructure – benefits and challenges regarding knowledge transfer and cultural change in a Swedish case

The aim of this paper is to investigate potential benefits and challenges regarding knowledge transfer and cultural change from the provider and buyer perspectives when using IPSOs for Swedish rail infrastructure. Considering material use and the importance of availability of the tracks makes rail infrastructure an interesting candidate for a business model based on a life-cycle approach, which can result in a reduction in cost and environmental impact.The concept of the Integrated Product Service Offering (IPSO) has in several business areas proven to be a means with potential to reduce the environmental impact of products and services, increase cost efficiency and quality, and act as a driver for change. The business model, which is based on a life-cycle approach, focuses on the function instead of the initial price of the product.Among the main findings are the lack of information and knowledge transfer that act as a barrier for innovation, and that the buyer's conservative business culture makes it difficult to implement new types of contracts. Since IPSO contracts require improved information transfer, they could potentially stimulate innovation as well as processes for evaluation of the contracts. By involving the contractors in the design phase their knowledge could be used in a better way, creating a feedback loop from practice to design.The empirical part, focusing on the rail infrastructure industry in Sweden, has been collected using individual interviews and a group interview approach.

PCP (Provider – Customer – Product) Triangle: How Can Manufacturing Intelligence be Maintained?

Limited insight is available regarding the benefits of an Integrated Product Service Offering (IPSO) as a possibility to encapsulate a technology. This paper applies a framework termed the PCP (Provider – Customer – Product) Triangle to two cases. The PCP Triangle aims to identify benefits (including technology encapsulation) and risks of IPSOs in a systematic manner. In one case, a technology is the core of the offering and IPSO is an alternative as a business model. The other case concerns biogas production, where know-how to control the production is one of the key assets of the provider to add value. By doing so, it validates the PCP Triangle further with cases and explains how it can be used. The results show that the PCP Triangle is a simple but effective tool to describe and visualize the flow of information around the product by discussing strategies for keeping the firm's intelligence in manufacturing. The paper also discusses the IPSO's contribution to environmental performance.

Actor's and System Maps for Integrated Product Service Offerings – Practical Experience from Two Companies

The objective is to analyze how proposed Integrated Product Service Offering (IPSO) actors and system maps can be utilized in order to identify and access IPSO-related requirements. Furthermore, the objective is to identify and analyze how IPSO-related requirements are managed and transformed into product-related design aspects. Literature review, interviews and workshops were the primary research methods used. The conclusion is that participating companies have realized that there are several issues within their operations that can be improved, and proposed maps provide support for this. These maps provide useful detailed information compared to other approaches, and are easy to use.

Scenarios for Resource Efficient Rail Infrastructure – Applying Integrated Product Service Offerings

The rail infrastructure in Sweden, with its long lifetime, large amounts of materials used and traditional procurement, has escalating maintenance costs. What would occur if the infrastructure is instead procured as an Integrated Product Service Offering (IPSO)? This paper discusses scenarios for increased resource efficiency and more value for the money spent by applying an IPSO perspective to rail infrastructure. The best option depends on the conditions at the construction site as well as how much the availability of the tracks is valued.

Advancing Development of Product-service Systems Using Ideas from Functional Product Development

In existing literature concerning integrated product-service (IPS) offers within manufacturing industry there are various closely related business concepts covering the shift from offering only physical artifacts (e.g. material goods, hardware) towards provision of integrated products and services, as well as further advanced offers. It has been observed that manufacturing companies offering, for instance, Product-Service Systems (PSS) face certain challenges during the development process. Further, research regarding Functional Products (FP) has developed ideas and methods that are also applicable to the PSS development process. FP and PSS are, depending on the level of complexity, often developed and later operated by regional or global provider consortiums. This paper, based on a literature review, highlights unsolved challenges in the development of PSS offerings and further proposes how ideas and methods from FP development (FPD) may resolve some of those challenges. Thus, ideas from FPD may advance the development of PSS, as well as other IPS offerings, towards being additionally robust and innovative, though also more complex.

Uncovering benefits and risks of integrated product service offerings — Using a case of technology encapsulation

The objective of this article is to uncover benefits and risks of Integrated Product Service Offering (IPSO) in a systematic manner. To do so, it adopts an explorative longitudinal in-depth case study (development of an IPSO based on a new technology) and adds insights to the existing literature. The article first proposes a theoretical and generic framework termed the PCP (Provider — Customer — Product) triangle with associated information flow and uncertainty. Second, various types of benefits and risks are presented based on the framework. Among others, the benefit of keeping IPR (Intellectual Property Rights) with the provider and the risk of regulation change are new findings from the case study. In addition, the case study reveals that IPSO is regarded as a positive contributor to innovation. Applying the framework and classification of benefits and risks as norms to other cases has yet to be done for verification. However, the framework contributes scientifically to a better understanding of the benefits and risks of IPSO. In addition, this framework is advantageous with its easiness to understand, which contributes practically to the dissemination of IPSO insight to industry.

Competitive product-service systems: lessons from a multicase study

In an attempt to maintain competitiveness, more and more firms are moving towards business models that integrate equipment, goods and services, such as in a product-service system (PSS), with a view to delivering value. This transition requires a shift in business thinking for developing arrangements to provide integrated product-service (PS) offerings that are sustainable, technical and/or marketable. The aim of this article is to offer insights into work systems for providing integrated PS offerings by competitive firms. It adopts ‘work system theory’ as a research lens and an inductive multiple-case logic consisting of an in-depth exploratory study of four competitive micro-engineering firms, to capture ‘what’ and ‘how’ information and service systems contribute to the sustainability, technical and marketability themes for competitiveness using PSSs. The article finds that technical requirements of competitive PSSs are best fulfilled in work systems that emphasise individual timeliness/ buy-ins, synchronous communications managed by strategic roles and tie-ins offered by service contracts. The study also revealed an emphasis, by the case firms, on relationship building and policy implementation for achieving PSS marketability and sustainability, respectively.

Environmental and economic benefits of Integrated Product Service Offerings quantified with real business cases

This paper quantifies environmental and economic benefits of the Integrated Product Service Offering (IPSO) in real practice from a life cycle perspective, in comparison with its corresponding product-sales type business as a reference. The paper also discusses the engineering activities contributing to those effects, as well as their enablers. To reach this goal, the paper investigates three IPSOs as real-life business cases in industry. Those cases are selected from different sectors and have different characteristics. In addition, the paper calculates and compares environmental impacts and economic costs of different offerings in each case through the use of Life Cycle Assessment and Life Cycle Costing, respectively. In all three cases, IPSOs had environmental and economic advantages in comparison with the product-sales type business. The engineering activities contributing to those advantages under IPSOs were recycling, remanufacturing, reuse, maintenance, and holistic planning and operation. The enablers were found to be high flexibility for realizing products and services and close relationships with relevant actors.