Product-as-a-service transition for original equipment manufacturers: Challenges, performance metrics, and design guidelines – The case of electrical and electronic equipment

Product-as-a-Service (PaaS) is a circular business model that allows original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) to enhance their product offerings, and capture the economic value by cascading value retention processes like repair, reuse, refurbishment, remanufacturing, and afterward recycling. The shift from traditional product ownership models to PaaS models requires a systemic transformation in how products are designed, delivered, and supported. In this paper we focus on the PaaS models for electrical and electronic equipment (EEE) for consumer markets. To ensure successful deployment we identify four key pillars of PaaS transformation: product design, service offerings, enabling technologies and supporting infrastructure. Through this research, we explore how identified challenges can be linked to indicators and guidelines as potential solutions for each of the four pillars. By applying PRISMA and bibliometric analysis, we identified 229 challenges, 182 indicators, and 169 design barriers and categorize them within the four fundamental pillars of PaaS: products, services, technologies, and infrastructure. Our findings highlight a notable deficiency in performance indicators and design guidelines related to both infrastructure and technology, resulting in a lack of methods and tools to support the development of circular PaaS offerings and ecosystems. This study suggests relating challenges, performance indicators, and design guidelines with each other for ultimately coming up with PaaS decision guidance for both designers and decision makers.