What Affect Manufacturers Approaching Servitization: A Case Study in HVAC Industry

Part 6: Product-Service Systems and Smart ProductsInternational audienceProduct Service System (PSS) development involves both manufacturing and service workers, carrying them great potential to pursue industrial competitiveness, customer satisfaction and sustainable improvement. The belief is that the development level of PSS design is slowly evolving through a path strongly driven by the evolution of the technology and the progressive involvement of the industry in its application. However, on one side some companies still need to understand the relevance of the development process related to their service offer, on the other best practices able to improve the PSS development processes performances more systematically are needed. The paper proposes a case study, first providing a mapping of the service offer of Company A, an Italian company in the humidifiers industry. Then, it investigates, through a content analysis, what could affect companies both positively or negatively to switch their approach from a product-centric to a service integrated one. This transition would enable them in the future to develop more advanced PSSs, opening new market opportunities and being more capable of satisfying customer needs

Business Model Innovation: A Process Model and Toolset for Servitizing Industrial Firms

The transition from a traditional business model (BM), based on product sales, to a service-oriented BM constitutes an opportunity for increasing revenues and achieving competitive advantages in industrial firms. In particular, faced with the commoditization of goods, declining profitability and customers with complex needs, an increasing number of companies are reorienting their offering from selling products to providing solutions. However, to be successful in this transformationmanufacturers should not only shift their value proposition but also need to redesign their BM (Baines, Lightfoot, Benedettini, & Kay, 2009). But service- oriented BMs, particularly in capital goods companies, have received limited attention to date, and both the practitioners and the academia have limited knowledge on how to implement them (Adrodegari & Saccani, 2017). In fact, this transition implies several challenges, including a cultural shift from an engineering- and productcentred core culture to a more relational and customer-oriented one; a new strategy matching customers and business needs, providing them a clear value proposition; the redesign of products and processes. The company has to adapt its supply chain to set up a delivery network capable of distributing the service components of its offering. Thus, it is not surprising that, despite their potential benefits, a limited application of service-oriented BMs has been observed in the capital goods sector, particularly by the Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) that find it extremely difficult to embrace the transformation and face the abovementioned challenges. To date, few managerial guidelines have been developed to support this decision-making regarding such BM transformation (Reim, Parida, & Örtqvist, 2015). To provide a first step into closing this gap, this chapter presents a new business model innovation (BMI) process, a holistic and integrated multi-step methodology to support firms’ transition towards service-oriented BMs. Different from other works, this methodology provides a formalized service-oriented BM framework that helps companies in structuring and managing, in an integrated way, the relevant elements that have to be taken into account in this transition. Moreover, a toolkit has been developed in order to enable the application of the BMI process in the real worl

Emergence of Product-Service Systems

Product-Service Systems (PSSs) are a new emergent way to innovate traditional products and to extend the company portfolio, by reducing time and cost while offering high quality and meeting the expectations of both customers and stakeholders, which have to be considered during the design and development pro- cess (Complex systems concurrent engineering. Springer, London, pp. 321\u2013328, 2007 [1]). A further challenge is to close loops between Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) and Service Lifecycle Management (SLM) by providing feedback from service delivery to the beginning-of-life phase of products, or defining a structured procedure to coordinate product and service development activities. The objective of this chapter is to provide a common understanding about PSSs, to deepen the Servitization process and its main features, and to understand how PLM and SLM can be integrated to define future organization of PSS-oriented companies. The final aim is to present PSS as a new business model, which companies can adopt to innovate their products and to enlarge their offer to the market, according to a consumer-oriented approach