Global challenges such as increasingly competitive markets, low-cost competition, shorter lead time demands, and high quality/value output are transforming the business model of the company to focus beyond the performance requirements. In order to meet these challenges, companies are highly concerned with the customer perceived value, which is to connect the product with the customer in a better way and become more proactive to fulfil the customer needs, via function-oriented business models and Product-Service Systems.

In literature, the conceptual phase is distinguished as the most critical phase of the product development process. Many authors have recognized the improvement of design in the conceptual phase as the mean to deliver a successful product in the market. At the decision gate, where concepts are selected for further development, the design team needs knowledge/data about the long-term consequences of their early decision, to see how changes in design propagate to the entire lifecycle of the product.

The main goal of the thesis is to describe how the design of Product-Service Systems in the conceptual phase can be improved through the use of a data-driven approach. The latter provides an opportunity to enhance decision making and to provide better support at the early development phase. The study highlights how data are managed and used in current industrial setting and indicates the room for improvement with current practices. The thesis further provides guidelines to efficiently use data into the modelling and simulation activities to increase design knowledge. As a result of this study, a data-driven approach emerged to support the early design decision.

 The thesis presents initial descriptive study findings from the empirical investigations, showing a model-based approach that creates awareness about the value of a new design concept, thus acting as a key enabler to use data in design. This will create a link between the product engineering characteristic to the high-level attributes of customer satisfaction and provider’s long-term profitability. The preliminary results indicate that the application of simulation models to frontload the early design stage creates awareness about how performance can lead to value creation, helping multidisciplinary teams to perform quick trade-off and what-if analysis on design configurations. The proposed framework shows how data from various sources are used through a chain of simulations to understand the entire product lifecycle. The proposed approach holds a potential to improve the key performance indicators for Product-Service Systems development: lead time, design quality, cost and most importantly deliver a value-added product to the customer.

Research in Product Service Systems design increasingly focuses on how to develop ‘capabilities’ for assessing the value of solutions already in  a design project fuzzy front end. A datadriven approach shall then guide engineers in the process of identifying what to develop, and not merely to verify if a solution meets (or not) performance requirements. This process of frontloading problem identification and solution generation activities with models is of high interest to raise quality and lower risk and cost for the development work. The objective of the paper is to explore the use of a data-driven approach to enable value prediction of packaging material configurations in early design. Its main objective is to present a methodological approach and a framework to connect high-level aspects of customer value with simulations and analysis conducted on the mechanical properties of packaging material.

Resale value is an important aspect to be addressed when companies aim to shift from one-sale models to Product Service Systems (PSS). In the initial stages of the PSS design process, it is beneficial to predict how the mechanical features of the PSS hardware will impact resale value, so to orient business strategy decisions accordingly. The objective of this work is to propose a methodology to model the resale value of road compaction equipment using data mining techniques. By scrapping and merging data sets from the machine manufacturer and from dealers of second-hand machines, the work discusses how the derived correlations may be used to populate value models for early stage decision making.

Ubiquitous and pervasive computing holds great potential in the domain of Product-Service Systems to introduce a model-driven paradigm for decision support. Data-driven design is often discussed as a critical enabler for developing simulation models that comprehensively explore the PSS design space for complex systems, linking of performances to customer and provider value. Emerging from the findings of two empirical studies conducted in collaboration with multinational manufacturing companies in the business-to-business market, this paper defines a data-driven framework to support engineering teams in exploring, early in the design process, the available design space for Product-Service Systems from a value perspective. Verification activities show that the framework and modeling approach is considered to fill a gap when it comes to stimulating value discussions across functions and organizational roles, as well as to grow a clearer picture of how different disciplines contribute to the creation of value for new solutions.