A Study on Total Performance Analysis of Service Oriented Eco-Businesses

Abstract

Eco-efficiency (DeSimone and Popoff in Eco-efficiency—the business link to sustainable development, MIT Press, Cambridge, 1997) has gained more and more attention these days. It is said that hopeful direction in industries to increase the eco-efficiency is de-materialization. In product development, the type of products that are suitably combined with service are often called product service system (PSS; Sakao and Shimomura in J Clean Prod 15(6):590–604, 2007). Designing the PSS efficiently will be a key issue in enhancing the eco-efficiency in many industries. The authors have gathered many examples of businesses that would increase sustainability (so-called eco-business) and extracted business rules (Kondoh and Mishima in Proceedings of ASME IDETC/CIE 2009, September 2009, CA, USA, DETC2009-86961; Kondoh et al. in Int J Prod Dev 6(3/4):334–352, 2008) from the examples. It was found that many PSS are included in the gathered examples. In this paper, we focus on PSS type businesses and try to analyze eco-efficiency of an example based on our evaluation method called total performance analysis (TPA) (Kondoh et al. in Int J Prod Dev 6(3/4):334–352, 2008; Kondoh et al. in Int J Autom Technol 3(1):56–62, 2009). And then, the paper tries to clarify the suitable combination of product and service is effective in enhancing the efficiency of the business. And it also concludes that the proposed evaluation method; TPA is helpful in analyzing the eco-efficiency of PSS.