Fabiana Pirola

• PhD
• Researcher at University of Bergamo

Manufacturing companies undergo a transformative journey in digital servitization, necessitating strategic, tactical, and operational shifts. The existing literature outlines the best practices on this process and examines challenges and opportunities through qualitative empirical evidence. We enrich the investigation through a quantitative explana...

The incessant demand for the use of online tools in education and industry may strain the resiliency of Higher Education Institutes (HEIs) in terms of resource availability, employment; and assurance of access. These factors, combined with the need for HEIs to be agile in adapting to the new normality, are worth investigating following Covid-19. Th...

The rapid evolution of market demand towards more sustainable solutions has brought manufacturing companies to extend their traditional product-centric offerings with new service-oriented proposals, based on a mix of tangible products and intangible services. Such a combination, known as Product-Service Systems (PSS), represents for manufacturing c...

Manufacturing companies are strongly investing in offerings based on combinations of products and services—known as Product Service Systems (PSS)—for establishing long-lasting relationships with customers under the premise that services can extend the products’ useful life and create additional value. Despite this, it is difficult to deliver servic...

To navigate competition and create higher value for customers, manufacturing companies are more and more adopting the strategy of Servitization by enriching their product offering with services in solutions known as Product-Service Systems (PSS). While the provision of PSS presents numerous advantages for customers and providers, they also pose sig...

Blended Learning (BL) is defined as a combination of face‐to‐face and digital activities that, in recent years, has been adopted more and more frequently by Higher Educational Institutions (HEIs). In the engineering field, the adoption of BL allows creating challenging situations for students with industry‐like problems to foster the acquisition of...

Knowledge extraction and reuse are critical topics for manufacturing companies willing to strengthen their Product-Service Systems (PSS) offerings. In manufacturing’s maintenance processes, effectiveness and efficiency depend on the ability to learn from past field interventions. Dealing with unstructured descriptions of maintenance activities has...

[BEST PAPER AWARD] To boost revenues and create a lasting competitive advantage in the present global market, an increasing number of manufacturing companies are experimenting with shifting from product-centric offerings to service solutions leveraging digital technologies according to the Industry 4.0 paradigm. This (digital) transformation, known...

The offering portfolios of manufacturing firms have become more servitized, leading to various product-service system (PSS) offerings, traditionally classified as product-oriented, use-oriented, and result-oriented. In this classification, the ownership of the products or assets plays a vital role in characterizing the offering. With industry 4.0,...

The number of servitized manufacturers is growing, along with the number of product-service system (PSS) offerings. Digitally-enabled PSS offerings can be complex value constructs comprising multiple products and services organized and executed to create new value for the stakeholders. Recent and past literature have focused on developing and comme...

The introduction of the fifth generation of mobile wireless communication, the 5G, is expected to have disruptive impacts on the manufacturing and logistics processes. The possibility to ensure smarter and faster mobile communications supports applications in several fields, from factory automation to maintenance, quality and logistics, enhancing t...

The topic of human-centric design of smart production and logistics processes is increasingly debated in both academic and industrial communities. However, there is still little existing research on the integration of this concept with companies’ daily operations. The research presented in this paper aims to expand this area of research by proposin...

To remain competitive, manufacturing companies are marketing to customers business offerings based on integrated packages of products and services – Product-Service Systems (PSS). While PSS offerings allow foreseeing economical benefits for customers and manufacturers, the sustainability assessment of PSS has not been extensively studied in the lit...

The design of Product-Service Systems (PSS) in manufacturing companies has been widely researched over the past three decades, with contributions from various backgrounds. However, the multidisciplinary field led to the development of disparate approaches for PSS design, which furthermore deficiently include sustainability considerations. Such disc...

The fourth industrial revolution is characterized by the increasing availability of data, which can be collected from machines to create digital counterparts of them (e.g., Digital Shadow, Digital Twin), understand their status, and drive strategic and operational decisions. To effectively create and use such digital counterparts, it is necessary t...

The combination of servitization and digitalization is increasingly changing the economy and society at the global level towards sustainability goals. Companies are shifting their business models, typically oriented to selling products, towards providing bundles of products and services and integrating them with technologies enabling data collectio...

In the contention of the current industrial landscape, an increasing number of manufacturing firms are experimenting with the transition from product-centric offerings to service-based value concepts and product-service bundles as high-value integrated customer solutions to increase their revenues and build sustainable competitive advantages; a phe...

Manufacturing companies operate in global environments where competition is increasingly aggressive. To remain competitive, they need to differentiate themselves by updating and expanding their offerings to customers, for instance through the digitalization and servitization phenomena, which allow companies to innovate business models in this direc...

Digitalization, sustainability, and servitization are transforming economy and society globally. Companies are increasingly changing their business model toward providing a data-driven Product Service System (PSS), namely bundles of products and services integrated with some digital technology. Different methods and tools have been proposed to desi...

Data availability is changing the way companies make decisions at various levels (e.g., strategical and operational). Researchers and practitioners are exploring how product–service system (PSS) providers can benefit from data availability and usage, especially when it comes to making decisions related to service delivery. One of the services that...

As is known, sustainability issues represent one of the main challenges companies have to face. Among all, the fashion industry is considered one of the most impactful, both in terms of resource utilization and pollution. Fashion renting is a recent business model for companies to reduce their environmental footprint, following a circular economy a...

Even if usually filled in the form of unstructured text, maintenance service reports can be an important source of information for manufacturing companies providing field and remote maintenance services to their customers. By analyzing their content, companies can discover hidden knowledge that can be used for improvement purposes. By exploiting Na...

IoT solutions represent one of the most powerful approaches towards asset and maintenance management supporting a multi-user environment that can be adopted to monitor machine and guide decision-making at different levels. Several studies discussed the benefits that may be achieved, but few studies discussed how to implement such a complex process...

Servitization is a global trend in the manufacturing industry that requires a challenging and complex transformation. In this context, engineering and design Product-Service Systems (PSS), capturing both product and service perspectives and balancing customer satisfaction and internal efficiency, are becoming more and more essential. To this purpos...

Nowadays, being able to guarantee high performance of the assets sold and be responsive to a maintenance request is considered fundamental to keep lasting relationships with customers, especially in a product-service system (PSS) scenario, where service is an important part of the overall offering. Digitalisation offers manufacturers new possibilit...

Nowadays, Internet of Things (IoT) platforms are becoming a huge opportunity for companies to collect data from connected machinery and analyse them to increase efficiency in production, optimize maintenance and introduce personalized service offerings. Specifically, multiple users can monitor real-time data and act based on updated information. Ne...

Simulation models have always been an aid in epidemiology for understanding the spread of epidemics and evaluating their containment policies. This paper illustrates how hybrid simulation can support companies in assessing COVID-19 containment measures in indoor environments. In particular, a Hybrid Simulation (HS) is presented. The HS model consis...

Following the spread of the Industry 4.0 paradigm, the role of digital technologies in manufacturing, especially in production and industrial logistics processes, has become increasingly pivotal. Although the push towards digitalization and processes interconnection can bring substantial benefits, it may also increase the complexity of processes in...

The technological revolution known as Industry 4.0 is permeating and changing the way companies of all sizes manage their processes. The revolution is influencing companies process at all levels, including production, service, and management ones. Not surprisingly, the strong digitalisation currently occurring in the industrial scenario is contribu...

Maintenance service delivery constitutes one of the most problematic tasks for companies offering such service. Besides dealing with customers expecting to be served as soon as possible, companies must consider the penalties they are incurring if the service is delivered later than the deadline, especially if the service suppliers want to establish...

Sustainability has been always recognised as a critical factor for the future of our society and the recent advancement in the technology domain can help in achieving sustainable operations. In this paper, the benefits related to data gathering, real-time analysis and optimization are specifically emphasised. A discrete-event simulation model has b...

Many industrial companies are introducing new automation and digital technologies to improve their manufacturing and logistics processes, thereby implementing the Industry 4.0 paradigm. Nevertheless, choosing and adopting the most appropriate technologies is challenging and requires companies to consider many factors, including human and organizati...

Purpose This paper aims to present a dual-perspective framework for maintenance service delivery that should be used by manufacturing companies to structure and manage their maintenance service delivery process, using aggregated historical and real-time data to improve operational decision-making. The framework, built for continuous improvement, al...

Sustainability has been always recognised as a critical factor for the future of our society and the recent advancement in the technology domain can help in achieving sustainable operations. In this paper, the benefits related to data gathering, real-time analysis and optimization are specifically emphasised. A discrete-event simulation model has b...

Many industrial companies are introducing new automation and digital technologies to improve their manufacturing and logistics processes, thereby implementing the Industry 4.0 paradigm. Nevertheless, choosing and adopting the most appropriate technologies is challenging and requires companies to consider many factors, including human and organizati...

Digital technologies are encouraging manufacturing companies in their servitization process by accelerating the offer of integrated product and service to create new value and grow relationships with customers in the Industry 4.0 era. In parallel, digitalization and servitization research streams are merging and paving the way for the Smart Product...

The spread of the Industry 4.0 paradigm introduced an increasing number of technological innovations into companies to improve logistics processes. During a transition to Logistics 4.0, it is necessary to consider all the issues that affect logistics, among which human factors (HF) are considered to be the most important. On the basis of the existi...

Data collection, analysis, and exploitation are among the most discussed topics in current researches related to Industry 4.0, especially as far as production themes are concerned. Some authors have discussed the benefits that could originate from the exploitation of product functioning data for maintenance delivery in the Product-Service System (P...

Many manufacturing companies are now facing the transition towards the development of a structured service offering in the servitization fashion. Especially in the case of a service like maintenance, the definition of a coherent process, able to collect and exploit in the right way the data from the field for decision-making scopes constitutes the...

Assessing the digital readiness of companies is becoming crucial to undertake a successful journey towards the digitalization of industry. Recently, the attention of both scholars and practitioners has turned to an extension of the assessment to the whole Supply Chain (SC). Given the importance of reaching a high level of integration and digital re...

The design of Product-Service Systems (PSS) has been approached from several perspectives like the process, innovation, engineering and operational ones providing, for each one of those, a specific view on the problem. This paper proposes a Data-Driven Product-Service System Design and Delivery (4DPSS) methodology focusing on the collection and exp...

The online meal order and delivery business has scaled up in the last few years. The delivery process is currently performed by self-employed contractors (i.e. cyclists); however, in the future, it might be performed using drones, as some pilot tests are currently experimenting with this possibility. This paper outlines a scenario in which a fleet...

In recent years, the introduction of Industry 4.0 technologies in the manufacturing landscape promoted the development of smart factories characterised by relevant socio-technical interactions between humans and machines. In this context, understanding and modelling the role of humans turns out to be crucial to develop efficient manufacturing syste...

Purpose Given the challenges that Industry 4.0 poses, the purpose of this paper is to propose a comprehensive assessment model suitable for evaluating small- and medium-size enterprises’ (SMEs) digital readiness levels, discuss the results of an assessment of 20 manufacturing SMEs using the proposed model and highlight priorities needed to undertak...

The adoption of Internet of Things and Cloud technologies in the context of Industry 4.0 provides manufacturing industries with the opportunity to collect data from multiple sources. Analytical tools and techniques can be then applied to support decision-making processes with valuable information. Industry 4.0 technologies have been implemented in...

The offer of logistic services (e.g. transport, inventory management, customs brokerage, IT solutions and so forth) targeted and personalised to the different customers' needs is expanding thanks to the benefits foreseen from the implementation and exploitation of the Industry 4.0 technologies. However, this expansion comes at the cost of the incre...

Due to the commodisation and globalization of the markets, manufacturing companies have been pursuing new business models based on product-service bundles, which in literature have been investigated under the broad term of Product-Service Systems (PSS). Efficient provision of PSS is not immediate since it requires as a first condition a deep integr...

Due to the commodisation and globalization of the markets, manufacturing companies have been pursuing new business models based on product- service bundles, which in literature have been investigated under the broad term of Product-Service Systems (PSS). Efficient provision of PSS is not immediate since it requires as a first condition a deep integ...

Manufacturing companies are revolutionizing the way they deal with customers, trying to satisfy their emerging needs with new, Product-Service System-centered (PSS), offerings. The shift towards this offering and its implementation are not easy since the proposal of badly structured offerings leads to unsatisfactory results for all the stakeholders...

The Product-Service Systems (PSS) offering is spreading on the market. Companies are becoming aware that selling bundles of products and services can create additional value for them and for the customers. Despite this, the provision of additional services not natively designed to improve products usage is not trivial. In fact, not only services mu...

Manufacturing companies are moving toward new business models based on Product-Service System (PSS). Academic and scientific literature reveal that there is a lack of suitable methods, tools and methodologies to support early PSS design activities and, in particular, early PSS concepts assessment. This paper focuses on identification and selection...

The digital transformation of the manufacturing industry is currently unlocking new possibilities in terms of automation and improvement of existing business processes. Service is currently one of the key areas that are being affected by it and, while many use cases are proposed, their operational implementation often remains a challenge. This pape...

Nowadays, the terms Smart Logistics and Logistics 4.0 are used to represent the Industry 4.0 technology-based application in the field of logistics. The introduction of technology in logistics affects significantly the work of operators, opening new evolution scenarios and offering several opportunities of change of the human role in logistics. Sta...

This chapter provides a short introduction to the Product‐Service System Lean Design Methodology (PSSLDM). “Company” and “customer” are the core elements of the PSSLDM, highlighting the main objective of the methodology, namely the trade‐off between customer satisfaction and company performance. To this purpose, the PSSLDM encompasses the following...

The increasing availability of data gatherable from various sources and in several contexts, is forcing practitioners to find affordable ways to manage and exploit datasets. Within this context, machine learning (ML) - which can be described as a set of algorithms to analyse and process data to extract relevant features for clusterization, classifi...

Purpose Nowadays manufacturers companies are increasingly compelled to navigate towards servitization. Different methods and approaches were proposed in literature to support them to switch from traditional product-based business model to product service systems (PSSs). However, new knowledge, capabilities and skills were needed to consistently dev...

Product Service System (PSS) development involves both manufacturing and service workers, carrying them great potential to pursue industrial competitiveness, customer satisfaction and sustainable improvement. The belief is that the development level of PSS design is slowly evolving through a path strongly driven by the evolution of the technology a...

While enlarging their value proposition adding services to their product portfolio, an increasing number of manufacturing companies is suffering a lack of methods to engineer and manage the service offer effectively and efficiently. In particular, multinational companies are struggling with the complexity of organizing the service delivery process...

Nowadays, product service systems (PSSs) and smart products are surging in the market and acquiring a strategic role for companies' survival. Manufacturers, compelled towards the transformation process into PSS providers, have to face the challenge of building up knowledge for successfully providing such complex solutions, also resorting to the hel...

Companies are nowadays struggling to intercept the new needs arising from the market through the proposal of new offerings to customers and consumers. Simultaneously, they are facing the complexity connected to the transition toward the provision of an offering composed by a mix of products and services, namely the Product-Service System (PSS). As...

This paper focuses on the reconfiguration and scheduling optimization of a complex Flexible Manufacturing System and proposes a complete methodology from problem statement to analysis and solution definition and assessment. In particular, Discrete Event Simulation (DES) has been used to support decision-making. A complex case study has been carried...

The global crisis and the fierce competition of emerging countries make companies struggling to stay ahead of competition. The number of compa-nies that are enlarging their offer portfolio looking forward to new and increased sources of revenues is always increasing but the number of companies failing in successfully implementing servitization stra...

Companies searching for new ways to be competitive in dynamic markets are integrating product and service to better fulfill customer demands and improve sales. A well designed and efficiently developed Product-Service System (PSS) is a solid alternative to achieve this goal. The PSS design should search for new ways to add value for both company an...

Product-Service System lifecycle is characterized by several phases from the initial concept to the final disposal. However, as for conventional products, the profit generation and the market success of PSSs critically depend on the decisions taken during the initial lifecycle stages, when PSSs are conceptualized, designed, developed and engineered...

Service Engineering (SE) discipline is currently supporting companies during the engineering and re-engineering phases of their service offering. With the support of SE methods, companies can undertake their servitization journey with the best premise to gain as well as deliver value to their customers. For this purpose, the Service Engineering Met...

Recently, lots of manufacturing companies have been attracted by the possibility to differentiate themselves from competitors introducing product related services in their traditional portfolio. During this transition, however, companies are not properly supported by proper methods and tools. In particular, the majority of the approaches addressing...

The recent years have seen an increasing interest from the companies to differentiate themselves from competitors by enriching their portfolio with new product related services. The introduction of the Product Service System (PSS) worsened the companies' economic performance since the proposed PSSs were not designed using methodologies and tools cr...

Manufacturing companies whose products have become increasingly commoditized are currently striving to identify innovative value propositions allowing them to re-position themselves in the market. This is gradually leading to a business shift from delivering traditional transaction-based, product-centric offering to the provision of integrated prod...

One of the major difficulties encountered by companies nowadays is related to the engineering of service and product-service systems (PSS), including the definition of methods and techniques supporting their design and development. It is noteworthy to state that, in order to make PSS and service provision profitable in the long term, it is of utmos...

The global crisis and the fierce competition of emerging countries make companies struggling to stay ahead of competition. The number of companies that are enlarging their offer portfolio looking forward to new and increased sources of revenues is always increasing but the number of companies failing in successfully implementing servitization strat...

In the last years, an increasing number of companies are experiencing a gradual shift from a pure product to an integrated product-service system (PSS). Service Engineering introduces a methodology, methods and tools to help organizations to manage the development of an efficient and effective PSS. To balance the maximization of company internal ef...

Companies are striving to create new sources of value, providing integrated product-service solutions to customers, evolving from a “pure product” orientation towards a Product-Service System (PSS) perspective. In this context, Service Engineering (SE), the discipline concerned with the systematic development and design of product-services, is beco...

This paper illustrates the results of an empirical study involving 21 engineer-to-order (ETO) companies, operating in the machinery-building industry. The study investigates the needs and requirements of such companies in terms of software support for governing the businesses, with particular emphasis on production planning and control (PPC) proces...

Manufacturing companies are currently competing for the identification of innovative value propositions to position themselves in the market. This led to a shift from providing traditional transaction-based and product-centric offerings towards the provision of integrated solutions to their customers. In this context, Service Engineering, the disci...

Starting from the 90s, an increasing number of companies have been starting to move from a product-centric perspective towards Product-Service-System (PSS). In this context, suitable models, methods and tools to collect, engineer and embed in a single solution all the knowledge that meets or exceeds people's emotional needs and expectations are req...

In the last years, a number of companies have undertaken a shift to a service paradigm. Apart from the benefits obtained by the so called 'servitization', many companies have also suffered the lack of methodological and systematic tools to deal with the enlargement of their Product-Service Systems (PSS) offering. The few tools nowadays available in...

The service industry is recognized as a central element of modern economies. Services represent an important topic both for practitioners and researchers: although they may contribute substantially to a company’s bottom line, they still lack a methodological support and a systematic study for the design phase. To make service provision profitable i...

Manufacturing companies are heavily competing for the identification of new sources of value for the market, moving from a traditional transaction-based and product-centric orientation towards the provision of integrated solutions to their customers. In this context, Service Engineering, the discipline concerned with the systematic development and...

Our study focuses on companies operating according to an Engineer-To-Order (ETO) strategy, where each product has a distinctive degree of customization according to specific customer requirements. Due to the main features of ETO context (low level of repetitiveness and high responsiveness to customers' requirements changes), companies need differen...

Companies are striving to create new sources of value, providing integrated product-service solutions to customers, evolving from a “pure product” orientation towards a Product-Service System (PSS) perspective. In this context, Service Engineering (SE), the discipline concerned with the systematic development and design of product-services, is beco...