Product-Service Business Concept Design: Real-world Case of a Small Furniture Manufacturing Firm

Service elements are added and enhanced to make manufacturing companies more innovativeand grow revenue. The servitization process could take many different routes reflecting variousproperties of the manufacturing firm and its business contexts. Product-service systems designmethod developed at Sungkyunkwan Universty, Service Design Institute, has been applied to asmall furniture manufacturing company to demonstrate the utility of the method and to deviseimprovements. First, the business context of the company has been analyzed mainly in threeaspects of business capacity, internal capacity and customer base. Then, requirements of thecompany's clients and their customers have been obtained. Next, a co-creative designworkshop with the design team and the company team has been conducted to identify valuesfrom economical, ecological and experienceaspects. The activity of the workshop is todevelop initial service concepts to drive those key values. The diverse positioning of those serviceconcepts on the scale of service supporting product and service support customer is then developedto plan servitization phases. The specific service concepts are about company-customerrelationship building as well as customization and personalization in this case. Initial service conceptsare detailed with service blueprint so that prototyping and customer experience evaluation can bedone. Business models in different servitization phases are designed. Further prototyping andcustomer experience evaluation has been done with business strategy improvements. In this talk,the specific and real process of this servitization will be described with discussion on theimprovement of the method and the enhancement of the business.