A Design for X framework for PSS business models

Manufacturing companies are moving from product-centric offerings to services and solutions in order to increase revenues and build sustainable competitive advantage. This strategy is generally achieved through the provision of a product–service system (PSS) that may be considered as the combination of tangible products with a series of related intangible services in order to meet specific customer needs’. Therefore, the material products need to be characterized by specific design features in order to make more efficient and effective the provision of the product-related services. Moreover, the adoption of a product-service-system (PSS) business model necessitates an accurate attention on all the phases of the product life-cycle. According to this line of thought, concurrent engineering approach and, in particular, the adoption of design-for-x (DfX) techniques can represent an effective instrument to decrease maintenance cost, facilitate reuse and extent product life-cycle in order to effectively provide a PSS. The literature acknowledges the likely impacts of DfX approach in the implementation of PSS. However, the relationships between DfX types with the different PSS types as well as the DfX operational levers that manufacturing companies can implement based on the envisaged DfX type adopted still remain largely an uncharted territory. In order to fill this gap, this paper proposes a new literature-based DfX typology encompassing the suitable DfX types to be considered when implementing a PSS business model. The evaluation of the potential impacts of each DfX type on different configurations of PSS business models has been also investigated. This paper also presents a toolkit aimed at helping practitioners at identifying and evaluating practical actions to be taken in order to improve the product design according to the configuration of the envisaged PSS business model (BM) configuration