Decision-making Process for Product Planning of Product-Service Systems

Due to the shift from products to services and the resulting gain of importance in planning product-service systems (PSS), a reliable decision process for the planning phase of PSS is essential. In this paper, we defined requirements for such a decision process by analyzing several decision processes for early stages of product and service development from literature. Interpreting their advantages and disadvantages reveals that none of the approaches fulfills all requirements needed for planning PSS. For this reason, we built a decision process by combining and extending elements of existing decision processes. The result is a process model, which facilitates to adapt requirements and characteristics several times. Unlike other approaches from literature, this process provides a higher customer integration, adaptable requirements list and it considers services, tangible products and PSS-infrastructure. To identify weaknesses and strengths of our decision process, we conducted a small case study. For this, a student team used this process for planning a rentable pedelec for tourists and commuters.