Service innovation in household appliances: An industrial case study

Abstract

Service-oriented management is becoming increasingly popular to create new business infrastructures able to self-organize tangible and intangible manufacturing assets in a distributed and interoperable way. The final scope is to manage not simply the Product but also Services along the value chain. This paper presents an interesting case study about a great modern challenge: The implementation of such a service-oriented approach and the shift from PLM (Product Lifecycle Management) to SLM (Service Lifecycle Management). It describes business requirements elicitation towards the creation of an SLM-based ecosystem in collaboration with an Italian company leader in household appliances. The case study focuses on washing machines, analyses the traditional product use and a new service-oriented scenario and defines a list of requirements to be implemented for the creation of the future SLM-based ecosystem. © Springer-Verlag London 2013.