A Generic Knowledge-based Model for Commercial Offers: Towards a Unified Model to Configure Products, Services and PSS during Calls for Tenders

Abstract

Today, consumption patterns are changing: firstly, customers (private and industrial ones) want more and more products and services that can be personalized to their needs, and secondly, they are more and more willing to pay for usage of a product rather than ownership. Companies have therefore to adapt their catalog of solutions by putting on the market customizable and suitable solutions going from products to services, including all their possible combinations. The aim of this article is to propose a generic knowledge-based model, dedicated to commercial offers configuration, which can cope with all the diversity of solutions a company can deliver. Up to our knowledge, even if some works on product, service and product-service system exist, none is generic enough to support such commercial offer configuration while bidding. In this paper, after a brief state-of-the-art, the need of a generic model is set up. Then, a unified model is proposed and illustrated on use-cases coming from industrial situations.