Megatrends such as globalization and technological advances increase the pressure on manufacturing companies. A possible way out is to provide customized combinations of products and services. These so-called Product-Service Systems (PSS) enable companies to access new markets and can be used to differentiate themselves from competitors. However, providing PSS also creates challenges for companies, for example, an increase in complexity within the company, resulting in higher costs. In the first part of this paper, a literature review is used to identify drivers of complexity in the context of PSS. One of the identified main drivers is a rising variety of components and processes within the company. In order to reduce this internal variety and thus also the variety-induced complexity, new tools for the design of variety-oriented PSS are presented in the second part of this paper. The objective of the tools is to reveal the variety and help to reduce the internal variety of product and service components and processes without restricting the external variety of offerings. The newly developed tools are presented schematically and then the application of the tools on an industrial example is discussed. Finally, an outlook on further research topics is given.
