Design and configuration of Product-Service Systems: a Service Engineering procedure

The recent macro‐economic events have contributed to an increased awareness of the strategic relevance deriving from the provision of services related to products as an economic remedy for facing the sharp downfall of the markets. A relevant stream of literature, mainly rooted in the North-European research communities, has assigned an increasing emphasis to the role of Product-Service Systems (PSS) as a concrete response to these emerging pressures. The design and development of a PSS raises new issues, since the service component introduces further requirements than traditional product engineering. Compared to physical products, services are generally under-designed and inefficiently developed. In this context, Service Engineering is becoming a predominant field. Sharing the definitions provided by Bullinger et al. (2003) and Shimomura and Tomiyama (2005), it can be termed as a technical discipline concerned with the systematic design and development of services aiming at increasing the value of artefacts. It calls for the design and development of an integrated offering valuable to customers in order to contribute to a continuous positive change of state throughout the journey of experience they stage with a PSS. Unlike traditional engineering design whose aim is to improve only artefact functions, Service Engineering aims to increase the total satisfaction of the customers/users and to match their specification by improving both the functionality and/or quality of the artefacts and of the service content and the delivery channel. This cultural shift from a transaction-based approach to a long-term relational journey with the customer still needs to be thoroughly understood by companies along with the acquisition of the suitable models, methods and tools for collecting, engineering and embedding in a PSS all the knowledge that meets or exceeds people’s emotional needs and expectations. In fact manufacturing companies still adopt approaches based on a traditional engineering perspective to design and develop their integrated solutions. They engineer the “tangible” part and then adopt intuitive processes and methods to develop the “intangible” elements. The value obtained is therefore not optimised because it is an un-structured combination of “something methodologically and systematically approached” and “something rudimentally developed”. In this context the relevant aspect of Service Engineering as a new discipline is that it investigates service design and development with a systematic perspective and with a seamless integration of product and service contents. As reported in the state of the art on Service Engineering by Cavalieri and Pezzotta (2012), a significant part of the literature in PSS has provided contributions on methods and tools for supporting Service Engineering. However, a small number of methods have been developed specifically for service and PSS design and engineering. The most adopted ones derive from traditional engineering, business and computer science disciplines. In this context, purpose of this paper is to identify how to develop a Service Engineering systematic procedure to integrate the design capabilities of Service Explorer, a computer-aided modelling tool for Service Design developed at the Tokyo Metropolitan University, with a simulation test-bench which would enable the comparison of several PSS scenarios. Through Service Explorer designers can operate a PSS in the following ways (Arai and Shimomura, 2004; Hara et al., 2009; Sakao and Shimomura, 2007)): (i) express a PSS design model; (ii) edit the models; (iii) evaluate the total PSS by assigning each value of the components. In figure 1, a short explanation of the main phases and sub-phases of the developed procedure are carried out. In particular, the first three steps refer to the adoption of Service Explorer in order to define the Customer Value and how the value and the entities (and their attributes) are linked to the service delivery process by the Extended Service Blueprinting. Step 4 translates and transposes the information designed in the Service Explorer in the Simulator environment, while the last step refers to the real simulation and evaluation of the different scenarios in terms of customer value and company performance. By using the developed procedure there will be the possibility to compare different configurations of designed PSS able to satisfy customers’ needs and to evaluate the technical and financial performance in the PSS provider perspective. The procedure is currently limited to a theoretical state of development, however a short example has been also developed in order to verify the logical connection between the different phases.