Scientific and Technological objectives

The S/T objective of the project is to develop and prototype, through three business application cases, a business platform for the offering of capital goods whose main elements are:

• A business model oriented to transfer the access of the goods (the Product Service System) to the customer rather than the ownership (e.g. through renting). It is therefore based on the ongoing manufacturer-customer relationship rather than transactional (that means the manufacturer should promote and manage service activities on the products, such as preventive or condition-based maintenance), and be outcome-oriented (e.g. promoting pay-per-performance agreements, such as pay-per-use, pay-per-availability and so forth).

• An improved design of the product and of its core systems, aimed at extending the lifecycle of the critical components, and to ease maintenance. This will be set along the conceptual lines of:
   - "Design for" (maintenance, serviceability, reconditioning, etc.);
   - Life Cycle Cost reduction, by addressing all the relevant phases and resources throughout the product lifecycle. For instance: the energy consumption should be minimized, as well as the need of consumables; its disassembly and disposal costs reduced, etc.;
   - Llifecycle duration extension, by taking into consideration all possible options, from the choice of materials, to the availability of improved in-field monitoring and remote assistance services;
   - Product's environmental impact reduction, through the choice of best-suited materials, disassembly and disposal plans, etc.;
   - Auto-diagnostic functions in order to better prevent down-time or (worse) breakdowns, to keep a log of how much, where, when and how the product is used, and speed-up the repair and support operations;
   - Interconnection functions in order to beam to the manufacturer the relevant diagnostic data and to support the billing operations;
  The product modularity will be a key feature for enabling the upgrade and re-use of some product modules.
  These concepts will be implemented, at least in part, by three business cases that will act as tentative showcases of the potential effect of re-design activities.

• A re-engineering of traditional (support) services and the definition of new services:
   - The former are oriented to increasing product availability and reducing lifecycle costs, and are based on condition based or preventive maintenance (minimizing failures and downtime costs), a revision of the workforce management and spare parts management activities (optimizing resource utilisation/productivity by the manufacturer or servicing organization), new IT supporting tools that will allow to collect the relevant information from the machines in-field and support the scheduling of maintenance activities.
   - The latter is oriented to the development of new services in line with the new business template, leveraging on the product ownership retained by the manufacturer and the identification of customer needs, moving form a "solution oriented" perspective. The identification and development of new services will be carried out according to a rigorous service engineering methodology, involving the definition o service prototypes.