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PurposeTraditionally, many manufacturers of cost intensive capital goods have largely focused on design, realization and distribution of high‐quality products. Meanwhile, their industrial customers increasingly expect to be provided with diverse services. These services predominantly aim at enhancing the functional and the economical performance of the underlying products. To systematically exploit the potential of services, an appropriate combination of products and services becomes crucial. For achieving desired benefits for both manufacturers and their industrial customers, product‐service systems (PSS) have to be configured systematically. This paper aims to address these issues.Design/methodology/approachThe presented approach considers customer, manufacturer and product life cycle specific aspects within the configuration of PSS. The paper presents a framework which comprises all activities necessary to conduct a systematic configuration of PSS. Throughout the paper, an elementary case study illustrates the activities.FindingsExemplary use cases indicate that the configuration of PSS using the presented approach is beneficial.Research limitations/implicationsThe case study is a success. However, especially the increasing complexity of modern capital goods demands for developing a suitable application software that supports the configuration.Originality/valueThe paper presents a successful application for conducting a customer, manufacturer and product life cycle‐oriented configuration of PSS.

Industrial Product-Service Systems (PSS) are realized within the value creation network of the PSS-provider in close cooperation with customers. Thereby, the organizational and operational structure of the value creation network as well as the customer interaction itself must be designed in order to guarantee the PSSprovider continuous product and customer feedback. This feedback provides the basis for a continuous PSS-improvement process, comprising customer specific and customer spanning improvement measures. This paper analyzes demands on the value creation network structure in order to enable a PSS-provider to implement a continuous PSS-improvement process. Based thereon, a continuous PSS-improvement process is provided.

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Nuclear weapons require the periodic replacement of tritium, a radioactive gas that decays at approximately 5.5 percent per year. Currently no tritium-supply facility exists in the US, and due to the decay, the tritium inventory will fall below the required reserve level in 2011. To decide how to fill this projected gap, the US Department of Energy assessed 10 tritium-supply alternatives, including several types of new reactors, an accelerator, and the use of commercial reactors. The DOE compared the alternatives with respect to three objectives: production assurance, cost, and environmental impacts. We combined a dynamic production-simulation model and probabilistic assessments of schedule, production capacity, and availability risks to predict the production behavior of each alternative over 40 years. We also assessed the cost and environmental risks. The secretary of energy decided to pursue both the commercial-reactor and accelerator alternatives, based, in part, on the results of this analysis.