Understanding Customer Needs to Engineer Product-Service Systems

Abstract

Abstract. Starting from the 90s, an increasing number of companies have been starting to move from a product-centric perspective towards Product-ServiceSystem (PSS). In this context, suitable models, methods and tools to collect, engineer and embed in a single solution all the knowledge that meets or exceeds people's emotional needs and expectations are required. Despite that, only few authors have proposed methodologies that can be easily adopted by industrial companies to design and engineer a product-service solution starting from the customer needs. Thus, this paper focuses on the customer needs analysis and aims at proposing a methodology to support companies in identifying customer needs, representing the starting point to the engineering and/or reengineering of PSS offering and the related delivery processes. An industrial case study in ABB S.p.A. has been carried out in order to test the methodology.

Design and Engineering of Product-Service Systems (PSS): TheSEEM Methodology and Modeling Toolkit

“…This model is based on Personas, fictional people describing the prototypical users of a product or service in terms of demographics and main values or needs. These Personas are the company reference point when engineering and defining the service offering (Pirola et al, 2014).…”

Needmining: Designing Digital Support to Elicit Needs from Social Media

“…Analyzing different methods of need elicitation in the literature, we can identify two distinct groups: traditional, time-proven methods as well as new, digital centric methods. In the fields of product design, service design, and marketing, traditional and well-known methods to identify and/or quantify customer needs include 1-to-1 interviews (Griffin andHauser, 1993), lead users (von Hippel, 1986), focus groups (Töpfer and Silbermann, 2008), empathic design (Leonard and Rayport, 1997), Kansei engineering (Nagamachi, 1995), house of quality (Herstatt and Verworn, 2007), Kano model (Berger et al, 1993), persona (Pirola et al, 2014), conjoint analysis (Polaine et al, 2013) as well as discrete choice (Sammer and Wüstenhagen, 2006). More recently, though, digital-centric, analytical support for the process of need identification has emerged (van Horn et al, 2012).…”

Advances in Production Management Systems: Issues, Trends, and Vision Towards 2030

“…Developing new, client, value propositions; re-designing operations and value chains; increasing the competencies, expertise and skills of people; as well as increasing systems-integration capabilities. These are just some of the research topics being explored over the years to identify effective and efficient servitization journey [92,[98][99][100][101][102][103].…”