An interactive design methodology for service engineering of functional sales concepts: a potential design for environment methodology

Manufacturing companies around the globe are striving to increase their revenues and profitability. One way is through Functional Sales, i.e. shifting the focus from the production of products to the production of services. Functional Sales and Design for Environment (DfE) have many common issues, e.g. the life cycle perspective. The paper’s aim is to highlight a proposed interactive design method for Service Engineering of Functional Sales offers and to relate this method to selected DfE methods and tools as well as users’ experiences with these methods and tools. The paper concludes that the proposed method has several benefits that are useful in DfE. One benefit is that the method does not focus on products but rather on how needs can be satisfied by increasing service content. Another is the visualization of e.g. validation in order to facilitate communication between different actors in the product development process.