A spiral process model to engineer a product service system: an explorative analysis through case studies

The concept of Product–Service System (PSS) prevails as a systemic approach for enabling a strategic and managerial transition from selling physical goods to providing product–service solutions that fulfil customer-specific and changeable needs. Besides the potential strategic and economic relevance, many companies do not know how to provide a PSS in an effective way and often incur in high costs without any expected return. In this context, it is becoming relevant to engineer PSS solutions envisioning and encompassing their whole lifecycle. For this purpose, it is necessary to rely on a well-framed PSS engineering process. The contribution of this paper is mainly addressed to understand which are the main characteristics (how) and the structure and sequence of the phases (what order) characterising a PSS engineering process model. The paper reports two case studies which provide the baseline for the identification of good practices and of a reference process model for PSS engineering.