Product-Service Systems Engineering: State of the art and research challenges

The growth of the global service economy has led to a dramatic increase in our daily interactions with highly specialized service systems. Service (or value-cocreation) interactions are both frequent and diverse, and may include retail, financial, healthcare, education, on-line, communications, technical support, entertainment, transportation, legal, professional, government, or many other types of specialized interactions. And yet surprisingly few students graduating from universities have studied anything about service or service systems. Service Science, Management, Engineering, and Design (SSMED), or service science for short, is an emerging discipline aimed at understanding service and innovating service systems. This article sketches an outline and provides an extensive, yet preliminary, set of references to provoke discussions about the interdisciplinary nature of SSMED. One difficult challenge remaining is to integrate multiple disciplines to create a new and unique service science.

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Service Science, Management, Engineering, and Design (SSMED): An Emerging Discipline - Outline & References

The growing demand for innovative services forces traditional product-oriented companies to perceive the potentials and strategic importance of services. Innovative services enable these companies to ensure their market positions and to achieve economical success. Due to this, it becomes necessary to systemize service design, development and management processes as well as to tightly integrate products and services. In this paper, methods and important fields of action regarding the systematization of services – service engineering (SE) – as well as the integration of products and services – industrial product-service systems (PSS) – are presented.

How to design and offer services successfully

Moving from products to solutions: Strategic approaches for developing capabilities

Service systems engineering (SSE) focuses on the systematic design and development of service systems. Guided by a value proposition, service systems enable value co-creation through a configuration of actors and resources (often including a service architecture, technology, information, and physical artifacts), therefore constituting complex socio-technical systems. IS research can play a leading role in understanding and developing service systems. SSE calls for research leading to actionable design theories, methods and approaches for systematically designing, developing and piloting service systems, based upon understanding the underlying principles of service systems. Three major challenges have been identified: engineering service architectures, engineering service systems interactions, and engineering resource mobilization, i.e. extending the access to and use of resources by means of IT. Researching SSE is challenging. Assessing the models, methods, or artifacts of SSE often requires embedded research within existing or even novel service systems. Consequently, approaches such as piloting IT-based innovations, design research or action research are the most promising for SSE research. As an integrative discipline, IS is in a unique position to spearhead the efforts in advancing the architecture, interaction, and resource base of service systems with evidence-based design.

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Service Systems Engineering : A Field for Future Information Systems Research

The paper proposes a model for assessing the maturity of new service development (NSD) processes in manufacturing companies that offer product-services The model adopts a five-stage scale on which key elements are evaluated according to the following dimensions: (1) the approach used to manage processes and projects (2) the use of specific resources, skills and tools (3) the involvement of customers, suppliers and other stakeholders and (4) the adoption of performance management systems An empirical application of the model was carried out based on an inter-company workshop and in-depth interviews Such a model allows not only to describe the maturity of NSD processes of a company but also to identify the main gaps and to prioritize improvement actions

Service development in product-service systems: a maturity model

Smart Services sind datenbasierte, individuell konfigurierbare Angebote aus Dienstleistungen, digitalen Diensten und Produkten, die uber Plattformen organisiert werden. Der Beitrag setzt sich anhand der drei Themenblocke „Technologie“, „Wertschopfung“ und „Arbeit“ mit den zentralen Chancen und Herausforderungen von Smart Services auseinander und zeigt erste methodische Gestaltungsansatze aus Projekten der angewandten Forschung auf.

Smart Services – Chancen und Herausforderungen digitalisierter Dienstleistungssysteme für Unternehmen

Innovating with services and integrating sustainability in economics are research issues of increasing importance. Green services are a recently relevant type in service research combining both fields. The potential seen in ecologically sustainable services is high, while a comprehensive approach in new service development is still missing. Based on an empirical study, a set of requirements for developing green services is introduced, considering specific criteria of ecological sustainability.

Requirements for developing green services

The methodology combination of a national foresight process in Germany

The digital transformation of economies is one of the megatrends of today’s world. The advancing equipment of machines and products with sensors and connectivity as well as their intelligent interconnection among each other leads to a mergence between physical and virtual worlds. This development is not limited to smart production systems in terms of an “Industry 4.0” only, but will also affect the increasingly important service business of manufacturing companies. Regarding “Smart Services” (data-based bundles of services, digital applications and technologies), the development of appropriate business models is seen as a key challenge for companies. Our paper illustrates how the approach “Value Proposition Design” can support manufacturing firms to develop Smart Service Business Models. Thus, we present insights from an applied research project, in which two different Business Model alternatives have been derived from applying Value Proposition Design.

Walter Ganz

Papers

Service development in product-service systems: a maturity model

Smart Services – Chancen und Herausforderungen digitalisierter Dienstleistungssysteme für Unternehmen

Requirements for developing green services

The methodology combination of a national foresight process in Germany

Applying Value Proposition Design for Developing Smart Service Business Models in Manufacturing Firms