Due to customer pressure and growing competition, industrial companies are increasingly moving towards providing integrated offerings of products and services (PSS). Despite this trend, literature providing a deep understanding of the challenges associated with this transition is limited, while publications discussing approaches that focus on overcoming these challenges are particularly lacking. This article is based on a multi-case study of two Swedish industrial companies undergoing the transition to designing and providing PSS. It reports on the challenges identified at the case companies as well as opportunities arising from and solutions to these challenges. Subsequent to initial research on the challenges, prescriptive approaches such as a life cycle costing method and a PSS design method were applied in the case companies over an extended time frame. On the one hand, these prescriptive approaches provided both a deeper understanding of the challenges, which include a persistent product centred mindset, a lack of adjustment to changed incentive structures and the separation of product and service design. On the other hand, they also led to effective solutions such as focusing on customer value and introducing a PSS transition facilitator for the design team. These solutions were adapted to the situations in the respective companies and they partly went beyond the prescriptive measures first introduced. Therefore, the article shows the applicability of prescriptive approaches and methods to detect, understand and alleviate the challenges of PSS design and provision. Further, the article provides broadly applicable learning for industrial companies undergoing this process.

The circular economy (CE) can drive sustainability. For companies to select and implement circularity strategies, they need to evaluate and compare the performance of these strategies both in terms of progress towards CE but also based on their feasibility and business outcomes. However, evaluation methods for circularity strategies at the product level are lacking. Therefore, this research proposes a multi-criteria evaluation method of circularity strategies at the product level which can be used by business decision-makers to evaluate and compare the initial business of the company, transformative and future circularity strategies. This multi-criteria evaluation method aims to assist business decision-makers to identify a preferred strategy by linking together a wide variety of criteria, i.e., environmental, economic, social, legislative, technical, and business, as well as by proposing relevant indicators that take into consideration, where possible, the life cycle perspective. It also allows for flexibility so that criteria, sub-criteria, and weighing factors can be altered by the business decision-makers to fit the needs of their specific case or product. Two illustrative examples based on case companies are presented to verify and illustrate the proposed method.

Extending the lifetime of passive products, i.e., products that do not consume materials or energy during the use phase, by implementing product-service systems (PSS) has a potential to reduce the environmental impact while being an attractive and straightforward measure for companies to implement. This research assesses the viability of introducing PSS for passive products, by documenting five real product cases of prolonging the lifetime through repair or refurbishment and by quantifying, through life cycle assessment (LCA) and life cycle costing (LCC), the change in environmental and economic outcome. The environmental impact (measured as global warming potential over the life cycle) was reduced for all cases because extraction and production dominated the impact. This reduction was 45–72% for most cases and mainly influenced by the number of reuses and the relative environmental burden of the components whose lifetime was prolonged. The costs for the company (measured as LCC from the manufacturer’s perspective) decreased too by 8–37%. The main reason that costs reduced less than the environmental impact is that some costs have no equivalent in LCA, e.g., administration and labor costs for services. The decreases in both LCA and LCC results, as well as the willingness of the companies to implement the changes, demonstrate that this measure can be financially attractive for companies to implement and effectively contribute to a circular economy.

Despite the existence of many life cycle costing (LCC) methods, LCC is not widely adopted and LCC methods are usually further tailored by practitioners. Moreover, little is known about how practising LCC improves life cycle management (LCM) especially if LCM is considered emergent and constantly developing. In a manufacturing company, LCC is prescriptively introduced to improve LCM. In the first part, this study describes how various methodological choices and other aspects of practising LCC were the outcome of contestation and conformity with extant practices and not only the best way to fulfil the LCC’s objective. This contestation can even influence if LCC is adopted. In the second part of the research, the implications of practising LCC on LCM are explored. LCC is found to positively propel LCM in many ways e.g., by spreading the life cycle idea, but may lead to a narrower understanding of the term life cycle resulting in the sustainability focus of LCM being overridden. The article also discusses how the findings can be taken into consideration when researchers develop LCC methods and when industry practises LCC.