Factors Influencing the Integration of Product and Service Design in Product-Service System Development
Résumé
The evolution of product offer towards an integrated solution combining services and products is widely considered as a competitive advantage for manufacturing companies. Consequently, the traditional stage-gate product design process has to evolve to integrate service design. The purpose of this research is to provide a better understanding on how this evolution can be taken into account in Product-Service System (PSS) design process by exploring evidences from literature and industrial cases. In this respect, a comparative analysis between the academic and industrial representative viewpoints has been conducted. Our findings show that the proposed PSS design process by PSS literature does not clearly consider customer integration in PSS design. The industrial practices identified in three case studies reveal different processes for PSS design and customer integration according to the type of PSS they are providing. The comparative study between literature and industrial practices offers some propositions to be explored in future research for distinctive features relating to PSS design process.