Using Product/Service-System Family Design for Efficient Customization with Lean Principles: Model, Method, and Tool

Abstract

Facing the need to address environmental issues of our society and individual customer needs and wants along with the trend of offering hybrids of services and products, the ability to efficiently design hybrid offerings is imperative to provide high levels of added value. This ability is much needed throughout the industry, while this type of design is highly challenging due to its high complexity. To date, however, there have been only a few proposals for methods that tackle this challenge at the conceptual design stage. This article proposes a model, a method, and a computerized tool that together support the conceptual design of families of product/service systems (PSSs). First, a PSS family model is presented and then implemented as an add-on to an existing computer-aided design (CAD) tool. Next, a method building upon the model and lean principles is developed as a design procedure. The software and the method are verified through an industrial example of designing a family of logistic services. The proposed model, method, and tool were found effective for describing different key elements of PSS family design. The power of the CAD tool was also demonstrated by taking advantage of a database of model building blocks and semi-automatic calculations.