Design of modular Service-Variants
A methodical approach for industrial Services (diss.)(new)
Researcher:
Financed by:
The Professorship’s own resources
Motivation:
Industrial Services have become an economically and strategically important aspect for manufacturing companies. However, there is still a great demand for procedure models and methods supporting companies in the systematic development of services. The scientific field of services engineering aims at developing the required procedure models and methods.
A characteristic aspect of industrial services in investments goods industry is the heterogeneity of its customers’ needs and requirements. Depending on the size of a customer, his localization or his industry his needs and requirements concerning industrial services may be very different from those of other customers. Meeting heterogeneity of customer requirements by correspondingly designed services improves service quality, customer satisfaction and hence brings along considerable economical and strategically potential.
Meeting heterogenic customer requirements means offering services that differ in relevant details but still leading to a similar service outcome. In analogy to considerations for material goods the concept of modularization offers an approach to limit complexity cost induced through variants to a level as low as possible. The differences between one service variant and another are concentrated in a defined and limited area of the service. Through this concentration of change, a greater amount of a service can be used in other variants as well, hence allowing to exploit economies of scale and avoiding unnecessary costs. In this thesis the concept of modularization is transferred to the context of industrial services and integrated into a method-supported procedure model.
Results:
The procedure model enables companies to systematically develop service variants based on an existing service within three distinct phases with several steps within each. In the first phase the service variant is specified through and analysis and target definition with the help of performance characteristics. In the second phase the elements of the service process related to the desire performance characteristics are modified through generic design options derived from literature. By taking into account the interdependencies between the elements of the service process, the changes necessary are limited to only a part of the service. In the third phase these limited changes are used for examining the profitability of the newly designed service variant. The developed procedure model is subsequently validated through two case studies. The different phases and steps of procedure model are followed with two real-life services of two different companies from Swiss investment goods industry. Through the case studies the development of services variants based on a given standard service can be demonstrated practically and the validity of the found results can be verified