Towards a Lean Product Service Systems (PSS) Design: State of the Art, Opportunities and Challenges

As for conventional products, the profit generation and the market success of Product Service Systems (PSS) critically depend on the decisions taken during the initial lifecycle stages, when PSSs are conceptualized, designed, developed and engineered. Successful cases show the adoption of lean techniques in the early stages of products development, impelling the authors to assess the application of the same approaches also to PSS development. For this reasons the paper aims to report the state of the art of PSS Design research, relating this strategic process to the Lean Thinking approaches typically applied in traditional Product Development and Manufacturing. The literature about PSS is classified and Lean Thinking evolvement from product manufacturing to design phases is described. On this basis, the paper defines which are the aspects of Lean Thinking already applied in PSS Development also uncovering gaps and lacks of the methods proposed by the scientific literature so far. This opens the way to new opportunities and challenges through many further research and industrial projects.