Shift from PLM to SLM: A Method to Support Business Requirements Elicitation for Service Innovation

PLM is a widely recognized approach to reduce time to market, in- crease process efficiency and control product lifecycle. However, service- oriented management is becoming increasingly popular to create new business infrastructures able to self-organize tangible and intangible manufacturing as- sets in a distributed and interoperable way [1]. The final scope is to manage not simply the Product but also Services along the value chain. The great modern challenge is the implementation of such a service-oriented approach and the shift from PLM (Product Lifecycle Management) to SLM (Service Lifecycle Management). This paper proposes a structured method to define a TO-BE ser- vice-oriented scenario and elicit business requirements towards the creation of an SLM-based ecosystem. A case study is developed in collaboration with an Italian company leader in household appliances. It focuses on washing machine, investigates AS-IS and TO-BE business scenarios by adopting Functional Analysis and Business Use Cases (BUC), and then defines the necessary busi- ness requirements to implement a service-based approach and create the future SLM ecosystem.