Quality Assessment of Technical Product-service Systems in the Machine Tool Industry

A stand-alone technical product in many cases is not sufficient to fulfill customers’ requirements. Machine tool manufacturers have already reacted to this fact by offering combinations of products and services, commonly known as technical Product-Service Systems (PSS). Today, nearly every machine tool manufacturer offers PSS. In order to stay competitive, quality leadership of PSS is a promising competitive strategy for machine tool manufacturers. Thus, it is necessary to develop a PSS specific quality management. However, key performance indicators and criteria for assessing the quality of PSS in the machine tool industry are currently missing.The aim of this paper is to present a customer-oriented approach for assessing the quality of PSS in the machine tool industry. This serves to ensure and continuously improve a long-term business relationship between a PSS provider and its customers. Use cases from the machine tool industry build the basis for this paper. To begin with, existing quality criteria of products and services in the machine tool industry are analyzed. These criteria are gathered by interviews with machine tool manufacturers, customer surveys and literature research. Next, interdependencies between product and service quality are identified. Then PSS-specific quality criteria are developed, which consider product and service quality criteria as well as their interdependencies. Finally, key performance indicators are presented in order to assess and benchmark the quality of PSS.