I did a graduation research within the E-PLM 2.0 project through the Business Models lectorate. E-PLM is the abbreviation for Extended Product Lifecycle Management. The aim of this project is to improve product lifecycle management (from idea to use by the customer) throughout the "supply chain". My assignment was focused on Product-as-a-Service and can be briefly summarized as researching the possibilities for a new service model that the organization, as a supplier of partial products in the medical industry, can use. With this new service model, the service provision around the sub-products can be improved.
To achieve this goal, I first looked at how the organization has set up the service provision at the moment. In addition, I investigated how other organizations have designed their service provision. To identify some 'best practices' from this, I used the idea of Product-Service Systems (PSS), see the picture below. In a Product-Service System, value for a customer is created by combining a product with services. For this I have found a framework in the literature with eight models for such Product-Service Systems. These models vary from a focus on purely the product (Pure product) to a focus on purely a service (Pure service). The transition from a product focus to a service focus is also referred to as "servitization".
The research on the PSS models, with the relevant organizational forms, has shown that a service model is strongly influenced by the customer needs and the capacity that the organization has to meet the customer needs. Servitization as a "journey" is not a straight line through all models, but a continuous play between supply and demand that can have a strengthening or weakening influence on the service offering.
The final advice for a new service model emerged from this conclusion. This new service model can be described on the basis of the framework. It consists of Product-related services, in which the after-sales offer is directly linked to the product, and is complemented with a first step towards Advice and consultancy in the form of individual training for customers. With the latter, the customer can carry out part of the service work himself if it is easier for the customer to organize. This can be contractually established with the customer via a so-called service-level agreement. An operational-level agreement can be linked internally to this in order to provide structure for the own organization.
