Purpose - The purpose of this thesis is to investigate what barriers there are when it comes to developing PSS in the process industry for their non-assembled products, both from a provider and customer perspective. Additionally, the purpose is further to investigate how companies can manage these barriers. Method - This master thesis is an exploratory multiple case study with an abductive approach. In total, 25 qualitative interviews were made, with respondents from seven different companies, both companies within the process industry and companies who act as customers to the process industry. The interviews were made during two phases, the first phase was exploratory interviews and the second phase was semi-structured interviews, the collected data were later analyzed with a thematic analysis. Findings - The main findings from this study is divided in five overarching categories, three originating from the interviews provider perspective, and two from the customer perspective, within all overarching categories, barriers and possible ways to manage these are identified. The three provider categories are: Characteristics of the process industry, Market and customer awareness and Extensive transformation required. Additionally, the customers categories are Customers perspectives of servitization and Fundamental management activities. The barriers from these categories has been grouped in a framework after the two constraints time and difficulty. Theoretical implications - This study contribute to the current literature about PSS, which has a clear gap when it comes to PSS for non-assembled products. This study contributes in two ways: Firstly, the findings from this study suggest that some part of the literature about PSS for assembled products could be transferred to products that are non-assembled, above this, the findings also highlighting unique barriers with PSS for non-assembled products. Secondly, this study contribute with clarity about how different barriers should be managed, something that partly lacks in today's PSS literature. Practical implications - With this study, companies within the process industry are provided with support when it comes to investigating new business opportunities, if it is worth for the companies within the process industry to start working with PSS, or if it is not. This study has three important contributions for managers. Firstly, due to the unique characteristics of the process industry, it is suggested that managers broaden the perspective and look wider than just the core-process to find servitization-possibilities. Secondly, managers are provided with useful information regarding PSS which could make them more comfortable when deciding to work with servitization, or not. Thirdly, as the findings shows that the process industry has constrained resources, a framework is presented aiming to aid managers prioritize which barriers to manage. Research limitations - Due to the limited time for this master thesis, only companies within Sweden has been contacted, at each company, a maximum of two persons were contacted.

In today's market, companies are faced with pressure to increase variety in product offerings. While increasing variety can help increase market share and sales growth, the costs of doing so can be significant. Ultimately, variety causes complexity in products and processes to soar, which negatively impacts product development, quality, production scheduling, efficiency and more. Product variety is just one common cause of product complexity, a topic that several researchers have tackled with several sources of product complexity now identified. However, even with such progress, product complexity continues to be a theoretical concept, making it difficult for companies to fully implement advances and fully manage product complexity. More and more companies are relying on product family design to handle product variety. Broadly, a product family can be defined as a group of products sharing common elements. The advantages for companies using product family strategies can be significant: they enable efficient derivation of product variants, reduce inventory and handling costs, as well as setup and retooling time. The design challenge however, is to select the product platform to generate a variety of products with minimum deviation from individual requirements. Accordingly, the structure of product families makes designing and evaluating them a challenging process. In order to fully embrace the relationships between variety, product complexity, and product families an understanding of product complexity causes and impacts is essential. This research begins by introducing four main dimensions of product complexity within the context of a generalized definition. Product complexity indicators suitable in product design, development and production are derived. By establishing measurements for the identified indicators and using clustering techniques, a complexity evaluation approach for product family designs is also developed in this research. The evaluation approach is also applied on a component basis, to identify Critical Components that are main sources and contributors of complexity within product families. By standardizing identified Critical Components, product complexity levels and associated costs can be managed. A case application of three product families from a tire manufacturing company is used to verify that this research approach is suitable for evaluating and managing product complexity in product families. / Ph. D.

Purpose – The purpose of this study is to increase knowledge regarding sustainable product-service systems (SPSS) barriers and solutions for non-assembled products. To answer this purpose, we developed the following research questions: (1) what barriers do providers face when utilizing SPSS in a non-assembled product context and (2) what solutions can be used to overcome these barriers? Method – This study was conducted as an abductive case study within SPSS in the renewable energy industry. We interviewed a total of 20 respondents from 16 different companies operating in China, Cyprus, and Sweden. Each respondent was chosen based on their experience and knowledge within the area. Findings – The findings are summarized in a framework that links the identified barriers with specific solutions. In brief, finding stakeholders for large and long-term investments was identified as a major barrier while educating stakeholders was suggested as a common solution. Theoretical and practical implications – The results disqualify two of the barriers in the existing literature while suggesting that varying market conditions is a new barrier. Furthermore, the study provides new insights to the existing literature and presents a framework that managers can use to matchmake SPSS-barriers with solutions. Limitations and future research – The study is limited to a case study focused on barriers and solutions for SPSS-providers. As a result, future research is suggested to validate the findings in another context and among other stakeholders.

In recent years, the necessity and opportunity for transforming pulp and paper mills into integrative units for large-scale output of biochemicals, biomaterials, and biofuels have come up in discussions of industrial renewal in the Northern hemisphere (mainly in Canada, Sweden and Finland). This transformation is related to technology shifts as well as changing business models based on new bioproducts due to profoundly new market conditions. The aim of this dissertation is to analyse how wood-based biomass industries – with an emphasis on incumbent pulp and paper industries (PPIs) – are managing this industrial and technological transformation that is taking place beyond the papermaking paradigm. Innovation theories on mature industries, their incumbents, and their propensity for technological lock-in and inertia are well-known. How new entrants and incumbents manage these large shifts is seen as central in understanding the dynamics of new, large-scale sustainable technologies on the one hand and the renewal of large, mature process industries on the other. Three research questions are addressed. First, where are the knowledge and technology frontiers developing in this transformation? Second, how are incumbents of PPIs are managing large market and technology shifts based on existing capabilities and knowledge bases? Third, what are the key mechanisms behind the transformation of PPIs from a process-industry perspective? The hermeneutical insights into the system of biomass technologies in general and the PPI industries in particular were gained by using a qualitative case-study approach, which formed the basis for four research articles and for outlining the empirical context and key words search of the quantitative bibliometric methods in a fifth research article. The research findings and main contributions address an identification of the, analytical, “formal”, science-based technology frontiers from a knowledge base perspective.  Old industrialised forest/PPI nations tended to specialize in rather slow growing, forest-based frontiers. They seem to have stayed close to the research trajectories of their woody raw material and knowledge base with the exception of North America. However, this not the entire explanation of transformation and technology development. Chemical pulp mills, in several cases developed into biorefineries, are the nexus of the emerging development block. They are contributing with products in a bioeconomy that is actively moving away from fossils and polluting materials (such as cement, cotton, plastics). In addition, demo plants (potentially nurturing hundreds of bioproducts) that are present at mill sites and involve different stakeholders, can act as the interface between analytical and synthetic knowledge bases that otherwise are difficult to combine in the upscaling phases of process industries. The response of PPI organizations to shifts in both technology and business models is also explained by the concept of diverging innovations of non-assembled products. These are part of a diversification of an industry from a forest industry perspective, and also of a diversification that may enter trajectories of several by-products and side-streams of the pulp “biorefinery” mill, and have analogies to a product-tree and to the material transformation flow of its production systems. But it is also a phenomenon of synergies in a broader multi-sectorial perspective, i.e. new sets of related products/processes that are able to replace industries of non-assembled products under the above-mentioned, new market conditions. The phenomenon of diverging innovations can be regarded as both an empirical contribution – the breaking up of a closed integrated process industry into something new with several emerging and integrative industries as a response to the large shifts in papermaking and sustainable needs in society – and as a theoretical remark on the model for non-assembled products presented by Utterback (1994). / Under de senaste åren har nödvändigheten och möjligheten att omvandla massa- och pappersbruk till integrerade produktionsenheter för storskalig produktion av biokemikalier, biomaterial och biobränslen uppkommit i diskussioner om industriell förnyelse på norra halvklotet - främst i Kanada, Sverige och Finland. Denna omvandling är relaterad till teknikskiften samt förändrade affärsmodeller baserade på nya bioprodukter och kraftigt ändrade marknadsförutsättningar. Syftet med avhandlingen är att analysera hur vedbaserade industrier – med betoning på befintliga massa- och pappersindustrin - hanterar denna industriella och tekniska omvandling utanför det traditionella papperstillverkningsparadigmet. Innovationsteorier om mogna branscher, deras benägenhet för teknisk inlåsning och tröghet är välkända. Hur nya och etablerade aktörer hanterar dessa stora förändringar ses som central för att förstå dynamiken i ny, storskalig, hållbar teknik å ena sidan och förnyelse av mogna processindustrier å andra sidan. Tre forskningsfrågor behandlas. Först, var utvecklas kunskaps- och teknikfronter i denna omvandling? För det andra, hur hanterar etablerade aktörer i massa- och pappersindustrin  stora marknads- och teknologiskiften baserade på befintliga kunskapsbaser? För det tredje, vilka är de huvudmekanismerna bakom omvandlingen av massa- och pappersindustrin ur ett processindustriellt perspektiv? Förståelsen för det biomasseteknologiska systemet i allmänhet och massa- och pappersindustrin i synnerhet erhölls genom att använda kvalitativa fallstudier och metoder. De låg till grund för fyra forskningsartiklar och utmejslade den empiriska kontexten för kvantitativa, bibliometriska metoder i en femte forskningsartikel. Forskningsresultaten utgörs bl a av en identifiering av analytiska, "formella", vetenskapligt baserade teknikfronter. Äldre skogsindustriländer tenderar att specialisera sig i långsamväxande, skogsbaserade teknikfronter. De följer forskningsbanor närmare deras vedråvaru- och kunskapsbaser (med undantag av Nordamerika). Men det är inte hela förklaringen till teknikutvecklingen och dess omställningspotential. Kemiska massabruk, i flera fall utvecklade till bioraffinaderier, kan utgöra hävstången för ett framväxande utvecklingsblock. De bidrar med produkter i en bioekonomi som aktivt rör sig bort från fossila och resursineffektiva material och processer (såsom cement, bomull, plast). Dessutom kan demonstrationsanläggningar härbärgera en storskalig testmiljö för hundratals bioprodukter som är placerade i närheten av massafabriker och som involverar forsknings-, industri- och samhällsintressenter. De kan ävenfungera som gränssnitt mellan analytiska och syntetiska kunskapsbaser som annars är svåra att kombinera i uppskalningsfaser. Massa- och pappersindustrins omvandling förklaras också av begreppet divergerande innovationer av icke-sammansatta produkter. Dessa är delvis en diversifiering av en bransch ur ett skogsindustriellt perspektiv, delvis en diversifiering som kan generera i biprodukter och sidoströmmar, som har analogier med produktträd och påminner om det materiella transformationsflödet i det egna produktionssystemet. Divergerande innovationer kan ge ett synergifenomen ur ett bredare sektoriellt perspektiv, dvs nya uppsättningar av produkter och processer som kan ersätta industrier med icke-sammansatta produkter under de nya marknadsförhållandena som ovan beskrivits. Fenomenet med divergerande innovationer kan betraktas som både ett empiriskt bidrag - att bryta upp en sluten, integrerad processindustri till något nytt med flera framväxande och integrerande näringar som ett svar på de stora förändringarna i industrin och i samhället – och också som en kritik av modellen för icke-sammansatta produkter som tidigare presenterats av Utterback (1994). / <p>QC 20160829</p>