A Digital Product-Service (DPS) system is a software that enables and supports equipment manufacturers and service providers in developing and operating their connected service offering.
It has 3 goals:
- generate value from the raw data received from connected products
- distribute value to all stakeholders in the product-service system
- let the provider capture such value
The system acts as the backbone of the connected product-service system. It relentlessly processes and analyzes the large amounts of data received from connected products to detect events, such as failures or executed jobs, and recognize patterns, such as good or bad product usage. It generates valuable insights, such as KPIs, trends, and benchmarks, and highlights situations requiring attention, such as anomalies or potential predicted failures. Additionally, the system provides recommendations, such as running a cleaning cycle, and triggers actions and workflows, such as placing an order for consumables or spare parts.
The system is also the central hub responsible for distributing information, recommendations, and actions to all stakeholders along the value chain of the product-service system, according to their roles, jobs, needs, and goals.
The system also establishes two-way communication with connected products, enabling and facilitating the remote delivery of commands, parameters, recipes and updates.
A new software category
DPS systems form a new software category.
The justification for this new software category arises from the fact that the needs of who want to leverage IoT to manage connected products and deliver connected services (digital services or digitally enabled services) are not being met by any adjacent software category such as IIoT Platforms, FSM software, BI platforms, CRM or ERP software.
This is precisely the reason why all equipment manufacturers that have so far undertaken this journey have built custom-made applications, often at considerable expense.
All these custom-made applications share very similar features, patterns and visualizations. We can easily file them into this category.
If you have already started the development of your “Cloud” or “Connect” solution, probably you are already building a custom-made DPS system
Users of a DPS system
Potentially, any stakeholder of a product-service system is a user of the DPS system.
A sample list of roles is:
- Roles inside the equipment manufacturer:
- service manager
- service technician
- R&D engineer
- sales account manager
- board member
- Roles inside a corporate end customer:
- plant / shop / office / process manager
- product / machine user
- internal maintenance manager
- internal maintenance technician
- Roles inside a private end customer:
- home owner
- family member
- guest
- Roles inside a third party Reseller / Distributor / Dealer / Technical Assistance Center (TAC):
- service manager
- service technician
- sales account manager
Main capabilities of a DPS system
A DPS system typically has the following main capabilities:
- Receiving, organizing and centrally processing data from connected products. The data flows in a continuous, uninterrupted stream.
- Establishing two-way communication with products, to allow remote delivery of commands, parameters, recipes, and software / firmware updates.
- Detecting events, such as failures or executed operations.
- Generating valuable insights, such as KPIs, trends, and benchmarks.
- Highlighting situations requiring attention, such as anomalies or potential predicted failures.
- Providing recommendations, such as running a cleaning cycle or performing an activity to solve a problem.
- Triggering actions and workflows, such as placing an order for consumables or spare parts, or dispatching a technician.
- Distributing information and providing digital capabilities to all stakeholders in the product-service system according to their roles, jobs, needs, and goals.
- Managing the after-sales lifecycle of products and services.
Integrations
A DPS system typically is not alone. It stands above the layer of IoT technologies responsible for establishing the connection with products and beside the manufacturer's information systems such as the ERP, CRM, and especially the FSM.