Product-as-a-Service Furniture for Fit-out project

[Pratik11521]

What would be the best way to model furniture items procured by a client through a PaaS (Product As A Service) model? In this case, the client is not purchasing the meeting room tables and chairs but leasing them, with the manufacturer retaining ownership throughout the 10-year leasing period.

You can think of this as an assured stewardship program from the manufacturer.

Would you be able to provide some tips and pointers to help our team model this?

[Fei Ngeow]

Hi Pratik,

That is a great question and it’s also awesome to hear the PaaS model expanding into furniture as well.

Have you ever modeled Interface carpets for a project before? They also use a similar ‘carpet-as-a-service’ model for their business and we often feature their carpets in our recommendation library. You can read more about their business here: Interface.

I would recommend that you apply the same method of modeling the furniture as we do for Interface carpets, however this would depend on the furniture company having an EPD for their products that incorporates their PaaS model. The EPD also acts as the evidence and ‘guarantee’ for what will occur at the end-of-life of the product.

If you haven’t modeled Interface carpets before, below are the steps:

1. Model the business-as-usual version for the furniture in your Reference Design (i.e. chair templates with default recurring & EOL assumptions).
2. Ensure that the EPDs for the furniture are available in the eTool library.
3. When modeling the Scenarios for the Proposed Design, replace the BAU furniture templates with the relevant EPDs to capture & demonstrate the impact change of using those products using our Scenarios Feature.

For more guidance on how to add EPDs into eTool and your Design, please refer to our Using EPDs knowledgebase post which also covers our new EPD Layer functionality.

I hope that answers your question!