Overcoming the product-service model adoption obstacles

Product-Service Systems (PSS) benefits are not limited to its providers and costumers, but the whole society might also take advantage from its sustainability impact. Nevertheless, many PSS projects still fail, and lots of customers stick to buying mere products or services in a transactional rather than a relational context. Shifting to the PSS paradigm requires a mind-set/organizational culture change both from the PSS’ provider and customer. On one hand, the manufacturing companies should change from production scale to use scale, therefore producing fewer products that will be more used, and the profit will be rather based on the services they provide. On the other hand, the customer must be flexible to give up product property in favor to product use when it pays off in the long term. Not surprisingly, this paradigm shift creates some obstacles that could deter companies from adapting the product-service concept, as a successful PSS will require different societal infrastructure, human structures and organizational layouts in order to function in a sustainable manner. This paper analyses the benefits and obstacles from/for PSS and proposes a self-assessment questionnaire that point to the needed business model changes in companies interested in adopting PSS

Service Chain Logistics Management for Increasing Equipment Uptime

Currently, as Industrial Product Service Systems (IPS2) concepts are becoming increasingly adopted by capital assets suppliers, further increase of equipment uptimes is increasingly gaining attention by academics and practitioners. Uptimes can be managed by both improving the maintenance decision making as well as considering appropriate service supply chain design decisions. Furthermore, the integration of Industry 4.0 tools can further boost the previous with its communication and connectivity ability. Knowledge on these aspects is available in academia as well as in practice, but, as this paper argues, not structured for making decisions that consider all of these aspects in an integrated way aiming at improving equipment uptime. Through literature review, we assess the existing literature on IPS2. In doing so this paper offers a two-fold contribution: On the one hand, it presents an exploratory literature review to identify knowledge gap and on the other hand, it proposes a suitable future research project