A user-business-oriented approach to design product-service systems

Currently Product-Service System (PSS) represents a widespread trend consisting of adding services to the physical product in order to add value and create a new market proposition. A successful PSS design requires exploiting both knowledge about the available technologies and involvement of right partners with different skills and competences able to collaborate among them in order to create and deliver the PSS. Moreover, PSS is also a new business opportunity to increase the industrial company market share; as a consequence the analysis of the customer needs should be the starting point to create a high-end product and a proper set of services to satisfy the target customers. In this context, this paper presents an integrated methodology to support a user-centred PSS design process starting from the deep analysis of customer needs. It involves different stages, from idea management to global network definition. Furthermore, its business model can be contemporarily defined along the design process and benefit the design itself by supporting decision- making. The merge between technical design issues and business-related aspects represents the main novelty of the proposed approach. In order to demonstrate its benefits for compnaies, it has been applied to a real industrial use case focusing on household appliances. The use case represents a valid example of how a product-oriented manufacturing company can validly extend its business by designing user-centred PSS.