In today's increasingly competitive markets, a growing number of traditional manufacturing companies, whose core business hinged for decades on providing products to the customers, are attempting to move towards a Product-Service-System (PSS) business model, enlarging their value proposition by providing services in addition to their products (Kowalkowski et al. 2015). The advantages and the benefits claimed in the introduction of a PSS business model have been discussed from several points of view (Braax and Visintin 2017). Greater differentiation from competitors and the possibility to 'lock-in' customers and 'lock-out' competitors (Neely 2008) together with the enhancement to a more efficient sustainable offering (Tukker 2015) are probably the most appealing.Nevertheless, the shift from a traditional product-oriented to an innovative PSS-based business model poses relevant challenges: traditional companies embarking in the servitization process have to review their entire organization, facing different levels of risks and uncertainties (Neely 2008;Ng and Yip 2009;Song, 2017). Indeed, PSS entails dynamic interactions among the tangible and intangible components of the PSS, namely the product, the service(s), the customer(s), the provider(s) and the entire infrastructure (Phumbua and Tjahjono 2012) that are complex to design and monitor. Therefore, at least two crucial steps to support companies in this transition can be identified: i) the design of proper PSSs in terms of product and service components, and ii) the assessment of the PSS during the design phases in terms of performance perceived by the customers, company efficiency and effectiveness, and environmental performance (Chou, Chen, and Conley 2015). However, models and tools specifically supporting the development of sustainable PSSs are still lacking (Vasantha et al. 2012). The adoption of models based on the PSS culture, as well as new design, assessment and costing methods, is depicted as one of the internal barriers to success during the implementation of a sustainable PSS business model (Vezzoli et al. 2015). Indeed, companies need to carry on with their traditional product design approach and, concurrently, they have to integrate it with proper service design activities as a mean to develop a marketable PSS.This study aims at contributing to the PSS research field suggesting a method to design and assess the PSS service component: the service provision process. This method must be then integrated with traditional product engineering methods in order to design the final PSS solution. More in detail, the work proposes the adoption of Business Process Simulation (BPS) to support the design and assessment of the PSS's service provision process according to three main key indicators defined as crucial: performance perceived by the customers, company efficiency, and environmental performance.The paper is structured as follows: Section 2 reports an analysis about the main critical features of the sustainable PSS provision process that require the ...
