A Lean PSS design and evaluation framework supported by KPI monitoring and context sensitivity tools

Over the last decade, Product-Service System (PSS) has been established as a prominent business model which promises sustainability. A great amount of literature work has been devoted to PSS issues, but there is fairly limited published work on integrated and easily applicable evaluation methodologies for PSS design, as well as a lack of Lean PSS approaches. Contributing to these directions, the present work introduces a framework for the evaluation and improvement of the Lean PSS design using key performance indicators (KPIs), Lean rules, and sentiment analysis, aiming to feed all the stages of PSS design lifecycle. According to the evaluation phase, a certain appropriate set of KPIs is selected and suggested to the PSS designer via a context-sensitivity analysis (CSA) tool through a pool, which have been identified after intensive literature survey, and systematically classified into five main categories: design, manufacturing, customer, environment, and sustainability. According to the same phase, sentiment analysis has been used to identify the polarity of the customer opinions regarding the PSS offerings. During the phase of Lean design assistance, Lean rules are selected using CSA and are suggested to the designer to ensure the minimization of wasteful activities. Enabler for the context awareness is the availability of feedback gathered from the manufacturing, shop-floor experts, and the different types of customers (business or final-product consumers), as well as the PSS lifecycle which the designer treats. The proposed framework is implemented in a software prototype and is applied in a mold-making industrial case study.