A Methodology for Product-service Systems Development

Servitization of manufacturing is getting more importance in our global economy due to the need of manufacturing companies to maintain their sustainability, promoting this way a more long term relation with their customers, and innovating and supplying added value with their products. Therefore, manufacturing companies are challenged to move into a paradigm shift that is to go from considering independently products and services and start to consider them integrated. To integrate services, in their core products, and to support this, process organizational changes are required, and methodologies that integrate the product and services development processes. An effective integration of these processes creates a potential for product-service innovation, that being exploited, contribute to increase competitiveness and to ensure sustainable businesses. In this article, we propose a new methodology for the development of product-service systems (PSS) that promotes the execution of processes for designing products and services, as a parallel sequence of activities, which leads to a consistent product-service development. The proposed methodology contributes for a clear understanding about the processes to be used in product-service design and development, the required organizational changes, and the integration of product-service design with business model definition.