How to Design and Evaluate Early PSS Concepts: The Product Service Concept Tree

Recently, lots of manufacturing companies have been attracted by the possibility to differentiate themselves from competitors introducing product related services in their traditional portfolio. During this transition, however, companies are not properly supported by proper methods and tools. In particular, the majority of the approaches addressing the PSS design are limiting their field of application only to "service design" and are specifically focusing on requirements generation and identification phases of the design process. Few of the approaches analysed contribute to concept development and evaluation phases and if so, they just address one of the two phases. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to propose the Product-Service Concept Tree (PSCT) method. This aims at suggesting a possible structure to identify, collect possible PSS solutions and manage their assessment (i.e. the selection of the best PSS to implement). Furthermore, it includes guidelines to lead industrial practitioners in easily use it. An application of the proposed method is also presented to demonstrate its industrial applicability.