Service Engineering

Technological progress, stringent competitive conditions and continually changing customer behaviour force the logistics industry to develop innovative solutions to generate long-term competitive advantage. Compared to the development of physical products, a systematic innovations management has not been established in logistics yet. Grounded in the analysis of interviews with experts from industry, this article puts forward requirements with respect to innovation management implementation and suggests the use of specific methods.

Facing increasing competition through globalization and short innovation cycles industry leaders need to include services in their innovation strategy. The WIN-model shows that combined strategies for product and service innovation are creating sustainable competitive advantages. Enhancing product offers with complex services and service solutions are long-term investments to sustain USPs. Integrated product and service innovation to create service solutions require deep understanding of customer needs. Delivering such services lead to close interaction with the customers which are not visible for competitors. To provide service solutions, services need to be included in the corporate innovation strategy. Services need to be driven by the C-suite. Great services will push the image and branding of your company and interaction with customers will push product innovation. A WIN-WIN situation!

Despite the increasing importance of industrial services, they are frequently developed unsystematically and often do not meet needs and expectations to guarantee a successful market launch. The increasing competition in many service markets emphasize the need for systematic analysis of all requirements, meaning to continuously develop innovative services that meet exactly with requirements of customers, employees, management and other stakeholders. This paper introduces a systematic process to analyse requirements within the process of new service development.

industrial enterprises to permanently develop new strategies to differentiate themselves from their competitors. Besides product innovations, services complementing these products are increasingly used for differentiation purposes. But only the right combination of different services forming a service portfolio allows successful service offering. Therefore, a systematic engineering approach is required to compose a service portfolio that fits to a company’s potentials as well as to customer requirements. However, until today this aspect of service engineering is not continuously and systematically supported.

In today’s competitive environment, product enhancing technical services (service products) are increasingly perceived as success factors in the production industry. Consequentially, there is a need for practically oriented models for systematic service product design. This paper defines service products and describes their functions and corresponding design dimensions. Furthermore, a recently developed phase model for systematic service product design is introduced, based on which an approach for the design of technical product service systems is presented. The approach aims at exploiting the largely unused potentials of the distribution and service network partners with which many production companies work together.

Innovative services increasingly represent a critical factor for industrial enterprises to differ from competitors. While the industrial engineering was optimized over decades, services generally are designed unsystematically. This results inefficient planning and failures in meeting the needs of the customer. The article gives an overview on basic forms of existing service engineering procedure models and describes a generic, ICT-supported framework for the service-specific design of development processes.