Decision-Support System-based Service Delivery in the Product-Service System Context: Literature Review and Gap Analysis

Manufacturing companies are revolutionizing the way they deal with customers, trying to satisfy their emerging needs with new, Product-Service System-centered (PSS), offerings. The shift towards this offering and its implementation are not easy since the proposal of badly structured offerings leads to unsatisfactory results for all the stakeholders. To obtain the maximum value in use, the way products and services are sold and delivered must be configured properly. In view of this, proper conceptualization, design and engineering methodologies must be adopted, along with suitable Decision Support Systems (DSS) to support them. DSS could help decision-makers in improving the service delivery process, proposing its scheduling, or deciding which kind service and how to provide it to customers. To be effective, DSS must be fed with right data and, in this sense, the implementation of Industry 4.0 technologies results crucial since the availability and exploitation of new, big, and structured datasets could improve DSS reliability. The aim of this work is to investigate how the presence of a DSS focused on service delivery process can enhance PSS offering in the context of Industry 4.0. The authors used a set of keywords related to PSS, service delivery process, DSS and Industry 4.0 to perform the research on the Scopus database. Following, they filtered results according to parameters of interest and, after reviewing the papers’ pool, they identified the final set for the review. The analysis highlighted a gap in literature due to the lack of researches around the improvements in the service delivery process achievable through the implementation of smarter DSS exploiting the Industry 4.0 technologies.