Using design rules to guide the PSS design in an engineering platform based on the product service lifecycle management paradigm

Nowadays, product service systems (PSSs) and smart products are surging in the market and acquiring a strategic role for companies' survival. Manufacturers, compelled towards the transformation process into PSS providers, have to face the challenge of building up knowledge for successfully providing such complex solutions, also resorting to the help of more effective IT systems and tools. The need to adopt a collaborative design platform is starting to be raised also in the PSS context, since companies often have a lack of knowledge for providing PSS. This work, grounded on a combination of lean and DfX-based theories, is aimed at improving the knowledge formalisation and sharing with the support of IT tools. In this sense, the lean design rules tool (LDRT), able to manage the PSS design knowledge generated is proposed and integrated in a more holistic engineering environment able to interact with product lifecycle management (PLM) systems.