A Blueprint for Engineering Service Definition

Abstract

Increasing numbers of businesses are moving from the supply of physical products to the delivery of product-service systems. The resulting need to support information related to both physical artefacts and associated services has a number of implications for the design of information systems used to support product-service systems through their lives. The focus of this chapter lies on service in the context of product service systems. Designers of service solutions need to be able to answer the question, “What information is needed in service design to enable the delivery of service excellence?” A key prerequisite to answering this question lies in understanding service elements that need to be supported, performance requirements of the service and how the service elements are related to the required performance. This chapter introduces a service information blueprint that has been designed to support service designers in gaining this understanding. The service information blueprint is a general purpose model for service definition that has been used both to define “as-is” and “to-be” services, service breakdown structures and service performance indicators, and to specify relationships between service processes and service requirements.