Engineering Design for Services: How to Ensure that Products are Designed to Support Servitization

This mini-guide is for managers and technologists within businesses who are setting out to design and manufacture products that are then offered to a customer through a services contract. It introduces the concept of Engineering Design for Services (EDfS) and explains how this can be applied in practice so that products are best suited to delivering long-term capability to customers at minimum cost to the manufacturer. The guide commences by explaining what is meant by EDfS, then describes its principles and illustrates these principles through hypothetical applications.

The insights presented in this mini-guide are based on substantial industry experience and academic research. Our intention is that the mini-guide equips managers with the knowledge and tools they need to introduce EDfS into their organisation. It assumes the reader has some prior knowledge of concepts such as servitization and advanced services, but that designing products for such services is relatively unfamiliar.