A comprehensive Engineering Environment to conceptualize, design and monitor Product Service Systems (PSS): An application case

The last decades have seen a remarkable evolution in customers' needs and requests. Their interest moved from purchasing the single product to receiving a prolonged support throughout the product lifecycle. In order to answer to these new requests, companies proposed a solution combining products and services called Product-Service System (PSS). In this optic, the role of service engineering grew over time. However, the supply of services not originally created for the considered product resulted into unsustainable economic positions on the companies' side and dissatisfaction on the customers' side. To prevent this situation, new methodologies considering not only the product and service design, but also their early integration, have been proposed in literature. Among these, the DIVERSITY project proposed the PSS Lean Design Methodology (PSSLDM), which considers the entire PSS lifecycle, from its conceptualization (stating form customers' needs) to the monitoring of its performance (once released on the market), in order to ameliorate its design and to identify possible future improvements. With the aim of supporting companies in exploiting the PSSLDM, the DIVERSITY design platform has been developed. The DIVERSITY platform is an aggregation of tools that cooperate to properly design a PSS. The consistency and maturity of the platform and of the tools were tested through an application case with the scope of collecting feedback and highlighting the next steps for the DIVERSITY platform implementation. This paper reports a description of the overall platform, summarizes the results obtained in the application case and proposes possible steps to improve the future platform implementation and usage.