Sustainability in the Service Offerings of Manufacturing companies: Evidence from the industrial sector

Nowadays manufacturing companies are changing their businesses to satisfy the sustainable objectives driven by governments and respond to climate change. An increasing number of manufacturing companies are adopting combinations of products and services, namely Product-Service Systems (PSS), to be more sustainable, having the potential of increasing revenues and reducing the environmental footprint by extending the product's lifetime and optimizing resource consumption. Even though PSS have the potential of achieving the sustainability goals of the Triple Bottom Line (TBL) – economic, environmental and social dimensions of sustainability –, the literature shows difficulties in defining sustainable PSS because of the intangibility and multiple sources of uncertainty related to the service domain. Indeed, referring to the PSS research, the literature has identified different paradoxes (e.g., the “service paradox” and the “rebound effects”) affecting the economic and environmental performances of these business models. Therefore, evaluating the economic and environmental sustainability of services is even more important. Starting from these considerations, this paper aims to understand how companies act to be more sustainable in the service delivery and to capture how they evaluate the economic and environmental sustainability performances of their services. The authors utilized semi-structured interviews to target companies selected from the “Digital Servitization” survey launched last year by an international group of researchers involved in the PSS research. These companies are characterized by diversified service offerings portfolios and declared to have metrics to evaluate the sustainability performance of their services but the results obtained show there are not supporting the design of advanced services. By offering the current status of sustainability evaluation of the service delivery through actual business cases, the article provides a contribution to the academic and industry domains. The main limitation of this study relies on the limited number of interviewed companies, although this would be increased in future developments.