Identifying Key Aspects of Success for Product Service Systems

As companies struggle with the various challenges of their PSS, identification and elimination of possible errors and potential challenges early in the design phase is crucial. This paper aims to identify the universal key aspects of success for a PSS; thus, providing a general foundation for many companies within the industry to focus their initial efforts. Utilizing historical and contemporary literature within the PSS field, one central aspect was identified with three additional aspects serving to support the core aspect that all PSS are centered around – creating customer value. Standardization, product usage information (PUI), and environmental sustainability all support the goal of ultimately adding customer value. While there is a potentially unlimited number of additional individual supporting aspects that are important and contribute to this objective, these do not apply to all PSS universally. As a combinational effort, the three supporting aspects help to ensure that value is added to the customer in different, but related routes. These aspects involved may be utilized to allow companies to examine and analyze their current PSS and implement these aspects into their PSS operations and/or, ideally, reflecting on them during the PSS design phase. A limitation of this study is, that the universal nature of the 4 identified key aspects reflects only the PSS cases within the literature reviewed.