TF7 Product Service System

Missions & Objectives

Industrial enterprises are gradually moving towards PSS, through servitisation / productisation, to keep themselves competitive in the market. For this purpose, they must differentiate themselves from other competitors based on higher value propositions or performant business processes. When improving the product or service performance reaches its limits, one open solution is to propose innovative combinations of products and services as Product-Service System (PSS) while sharing more information with customers and suppliers.

A PSS is a system including a mix of tangible products and intangible services designed, combined and provided to the customer so that they are jointly capable of fulfilling specific customer needs with higher added comparing to isolated products and services. The key components of a PSS are:

• The Product as a tangible commodity manufactured to be sold fulfilling user’s needs or supporting the creation of a service.
• The Service as an activity done for the stakeholders with an economic value, with intangible results.
• Enterprise processes and its resources supporting the Product-Service (P-S) lifecycle.

The above interrelated components, could belong to an alliance of companies, called PSS ecosystem, that  work together to design, to produce, to manage and to deliver PS. Environmental issues are also important in PSS since some PSS have lower environmental impact than traditional business models, e.g. when a service support the sharing of the physical products. In fact, servitisation might decrease the production and consequently the manufacturing negative impacts on the environment.

The mission of I-VLab TF7 is to create a community of industrials, innovators and researchers, working in the field of PSS, willing to develop servitization / productisation. Accordingly, the following objectives are targeted:

• To provide knowledge about PSS concepts and key dimensions
• To highlight prevailing trends and state-of-the art
• To analyse research and business priorities
• To identify research questions and potential solutions including methods or tools
• To bringing the relevant stakeholders together to facilitate collaborations among them and to propose international projects

Activities

• Launching the TF7 and call for members (starting mid-April)
• Opening a workspace in the portal for the TF7
• Working on issues related to PSS key dimensions (e.g. Business model, P-S lifecycles dependency and interoperation, PSS joint modelling, etc.)
• Collaborating with PSS cluster (of H2020) and organising events
• Identifying and analysing H2020 and national projects on PSS (e.g. PSYMBIOSYS, FALCO, DIVERSITY, ICP4Life, MANUTELLIGENCE, ProRegio)
• Developing use-cases and examples around industrial applications.
• Identifying future H2020 Calls on PSS and driving proposals preparation
• Preparing reports and publications including TF7 activity and main outcomes

Motivations

The main motivation for the creation and operation of TF7 is to bring together different stakeholders (e.g. Universities and Research Centres, solutions providers, Industrials as potential users, Potential Spin-offs and Start-ups, EU projects consortiums, etc.) with expertise in the field of PSS to collaborate and create synergy around this subject. This will strongly support the identification of prevailing trends, clarification of research and business locks and detection of potential or existing solutions. Moreover, such collaboration can lead to new business opportunities and possibilities of participating in European proposals.

Current EU Projects & PSS issues

	Psymbiosys: Product-Service Symbiotic Systems
	Diversity: Cloud Manufacturing and Social Software Based Context Sensitive Product-Service Engineering Environment for Globally Distributed Enterprise
	Falcon: Feedback mechanisms across the Lifecycle for Customer-driven Optimization of Innovative Product-Service Design
	Manutelligence: Product Service Design and Manufacturing Intelligence Engineering Platform
	ICP4Life: An Integrated Collaborative Platform for Managing the Product-Service Engineering Lifecycle
	ProRegio: Customer-driven design of product-services and production networks to adapt to regional market requirements