Exploring the relationship between after-sales strategy and product design

Modern industrial companies cannot consider their business role ending up with the transactional undertaking of product sale. They must indeed focus their efforts in ensuring a long-lasting and stable relationship with the final customer through the overall product life-cycle by providing a customized and value-added portfolio of connected services. In the western mature economies, the evolution of cultural and sociological models, along with the continuous breakthrough of the technological edges, are driving consumers to put more emphasis on the functional properties of a product. The transition from a product manufacturer into a service provider constitutes a major managerial challenge. Services require organizational principles, structures and processes new to the product manufacturers, which encompass the whole product life-cycle, from its conceptual phase to its dismissal point. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate how Design for X methodologies and practices can consistently enable the achievement of the objectives of specific after-sales strategic profiles, by encompassing those distinctive features which can at best fulfil the customer’s requirements and expectations throughout his product life-cycle usage. A model is proposed relating after-sales strategies with “Design for X” methodologies