Towards a Vision and Essential Steps in the Digital Transformation of Product Service Systems

For traditional product manufacturers, digital transformation of products and services means dealing with challenges with which they have not dealt before. Especially the different measures to be taken on a business, organizational, technical and IT level and the competencies needed when advancing from traditional to smart products and services are often unclear for strategists in those companies. In our work, focusing on the early phase of smartification, we propose a support method for small and medium sized enterprises to formulate an ambitious product vision and derive a path of useful steps to go ahead from a traditional product without smart elements to the developed product vision using a scenario based approach. Our scenario framework was developed by analyzing and clustering characteristics of appropriate approaches resulting from a literature review, using two fundamentally different approaches which either develop products with a business model or a technical/functional perspective. In order to apply and support the product development with a maturity model of smartifying product service systems, the two different approaches were merged for elaborating a common product vision and three essential steps leading the path towards the vision. Starting with a product having no smart components, in the first step the product and services are digitalized and connectivity is added. The second step covers, next to further smart components, the enhancement of using AI technology in data processing. The third step brings innovative business models into play.