Identification of induced complexity in product service system enterprises

At present, there is a trend toward developing a product service system business model for complex products, and many traditional manufacturing organizations are transforming to product service systems. In general, this will lead to greater dependency between certain organizations within multiorganization enterprises which will, in turn, induce complexity. The role matrix technique has been applied as a decision support tool for organizational transformation. This article shows its usefulness in an enterprise context and, through a case study in particular, in the product service system context. An analysis of a number of previous case studies has indicated how the role matrix technique characterizes types of industry, and the focus case study of product service system transformation in the transport sector is shown to include manufacturing and service structure, which leads to considerable induced complexity. The article concludes by showing how the role matrix technique is a useful decision support technique for managers engaged in enterprise transformation and, for the specific case study considered, how complexity may be induced during the product service system transformation.