Procurers, Providers and Users (PPU): towards a meta-role model for conceptualising product-service in the built environment

The product-service paradigm requires a shift in focus for many engineering disciplines, forcing
them to change from providing products to providing products and associated services. Such a
shift is likely to present several challenges to the built environment due to its inherent
organisational fragmentations and through-life discontinuities. This paper presents a preliminary
conceptualisation of the product-service paradigm as seen from a built environment perspective.
The proposed PPU model represents the meta-roles and the information flows, considered as
key to sustaining the product-service concept within the built environment.