Describing product-service systems with functional analysis

In times of globalization and saturated markets, requirements change significantly. A possibility to adapt to this can be found in the integration of products and services into so called Product-Service Systems (PSS). Migrating from a manufacturing company to a PSS provider raises different challenges though. The strategic question if a PSS implementation is an appropriate step for a company has to be evaluated carefully. Therefore it is necessary to define the required competences, which have to be integrated into the PSS implementing company. Furthermore, the competences have to be known for the PSS development process, especially in the Fuzzy Front End of innovation (FFE), which is the phase in the product development process where 80% of costs and properties of the product are defined. This paper describes the required competences for a PSS offer and breaks them for operationalisation down to functions, the base of a functional analysis.