Service Systems

Despite the claims on how stakeholders could benefit from electronic marketplaces (eMarketplaces), the actual user take-up of eMarketplaces have been modest and in many cases even failed to deliver their promises. We believe this is due to the lack of preparations in dealing with values of such ventures during the strategic planning of the organisations concerned. Given that values are

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Structured Abstract:

Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to provide further insight into operations management of the Product-Service (P-S) transition, known as servitization, and the resulting Product Service System (PSS) offerings. In exploring the product-service transition, this paper adopts a Service-Dominant (S-D) logic view of value creation, using it as a lens through which to explore value propositions of the P-S transition and their operations design.

Design/methodology/approach
This paper presents an in-depth case study of an Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) of durable capital equipment who, over the last five years, has expanded its offerings to include use- and result-orientated product-service systems. The research design uses a multi-method approach; employing 28 in-depth qualitative interviews with customers and employees and analysis of texts, documents and secondary data including five years of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), call centre and contract data.

Findings
The paper identifies 10 generic P-S attributes which are abstracted into four nested value propositions: asset value proposition; recovery value proposition; availability value proposition; and outcome value proposition. In examining the operations design for delivery of these value propositions, it is found that the role and importance of contextual variety increases as the organisation moves through the value propositions. Interdependencies amongst the value propositions and differences in operational design for each value proposition are also found.

Research limitations/implications
The paper investigates PSS through a S-D logic mindset. First, the paper considers value propositions of PSS not according to ‘product’ or ‘service’ but in terms of how resources (both material and human) are optimally designed to co-create customer value. Second, a value co-creation system of nested value propositions is illustrated. In so doing the findings have a number of implications for literature on both PSS and S-D logic. In addition, the research adds to the PSS literature through the identification and consideration of the concept of contextual use variety.

Practical implications
The paper demonstrates the complexity of the transition from product to service. Specifically, service cannot be seen as a bolt-on extra to their product offering; complexity caused by interactions and changes to the core offering require a systems perspective and consideration of both firm and customer skills and resources.

Originality/value
This paper extends existing literature on the P-S transition and its implications for operations management. Notably, it takes an S-D logic perspective of value creation and in so doing highlights the importance and role of contextual use variety in the P-S transition. It also provides further empirical evidence that the P-S transition cannot be treated as discrete stages but is evolutionary and requires a complex systems perspective.

ABSTRACT The DA/MS/SS Track is concerned first and fore-most with emerging managerial and organizational decision-making strategies, processes, tools, technologies, services and solutions in the Digital Age. This track has 4 interrelated themes. First theme, Analytics, focuses on decision making processes, tools and technologies. Mobile services focus on development and delivery of data, information and analysis results with mobile technology platforms. Challenges and issues of emerging service industries, and service orientation and -transformation of strategies, processes, organizations, systems and technologies are covered in Service Science. In this track, we also discuss about innovative approaches of decision making for/with Critical and Emerging Solutions.

Service management and design has largely focused on the interactions between employees and customers. This perspective holds that the quality of the “service experience” is primarily determined during this final “service encounter” that takes place in the “front stage.” This emphasis discounts the contribution of the activities in the “back stage” of the service value chain where materials or information needed by the front stage are processed. However, the vast increase in web-driven consumer self-service applications and other automated services requires new thinking about service design and service quality. It is essential to consider the entire network of services that comprise the back and front stages as complementary parts of a “service system.” We need new concepts and methods in service design that recognize how back stage information and processes can improve the front stage experience. This paper envisions a methodology for designing service systems that synthesizes (front-stage-oriented) user-centered design techniques with (back stage) methods for designing information-intensive applications.

Cet article se proposer de clarifier la distinction entre les systèmes de services et les écosystèmes de services en tant qu'outils analytiques. Ces dernières années, ces deux concepts ont gagné en importance dans la recherche sur les services et sont fréquemment utilisés de manière interchangeable. Cet article plaide pour une approche où l'écosystème de services est envisagé comme le contexte plus large dans lequel divers systèmes de services existent. À travers cette distinction, le couplage théorique cherche à expliquer comment les systèmes de services sont influencés par et peuvent utiliser des acteurs qui ne font pas partie de leur système formalisé, ainsi qu'à mieux comprendre comment les systèmes de services sont affectés par des influences externes.

Tendering processes need some improvements as they being used widely by government and private sector. The improvements that attempts to apply is to used Web services technology as a medium to process all the tenders that submitted by the interested contractors. This study is to develop an efficient Web application for prequalification tendering processes. Decision Support System (DSS) is used

The objective is to measure utility of real-time commercial decision making. It is important due to a higher possibility of mistakes in real-time decisions, problems with recording actual occurrences, and significant costs associated with predictions produced by algorithms. The first contribution is to use overall utility and represent individual utility with a monetary value instead of a prediction. The second is to calculate the benefit from predictions using the utility-based decision threshold. The third is to incorporate cost of predictions. For experiments, overall utility is used to evaluate communal and spike detection, and their adaptive versions. The overall utility results show that with fewer alerts, communal detection is better than spike detection. With more alerts, adaptive communal and spike detection are better than their static versions. To maximise overall utility with all algorithms, only 1% to 4% in the highest predictions should be alerts.

Libraries are places to share and to exchange information. As well, e-libraries can facilitate information access to digital documents and then improve knowledge exchanges and social interaction between members of communities on the Web. This article presents AnT&CoW (annotation tool for collaborative work), an annotation plug-in. Its design is based on scenarios. AnT&CoW supports discussions between users of an e-library; it enables document and annotation indexation according to a community classification schemes. User interactions might result in new document creation, so the tool also supports document creation

This paper describes a service architecture for a financial market monitoring and surveillance system in which different components interact in coordination with internal and external service providers to produce proactive alarms for potential fraud cases. The proposed service system is demonstrated through an exemplar case study of text mining and data mining to analyze the impact of'stock-touting'spam e-mails and misleading press releases on trading data. It also shows how an independent service provider could have ...

Purpose

People with complex health conditions must often navigate landscapes of uncoordinated public, private and voluntary health-care providers to obtain the care they need. Complex health conditions frequently transcend the scope of typical health-care service systems. The purpose of this paper is to explore and characterize such unique assemblages of actors and services as “user-defined ecosystems”.

Design/methodology/approach

Building on literature on customer ecosystems, this paper introduces the concept of the user-defined ecosystem (UDE). Using an abductive approach, the authors apply the concept in an interpretive, qualitative study of ten families with special needs children.

Findings

This study uncovers complex UDEs, where families actively combine a broad range of services. These ecosystems are unique for each family and extend beyond the scope of designed service ecosystems. Thus, the families are forced to assume an active, coordinating role.
Research limitations/implications

This paper shows how to identify ecosystems from the user’s point of view, based on the selected user unit (such as a family) and the focal value-creating function of the ecosystem for the user.

Social implications

This paper highlights how service providers can support and adapt to UDEs and, thus, contribute to user value and well-being. This can be used to understand users’ perspectives on service and systems in health and social care.

Originality/value

This study develops the concept of the UDE, which represents a customer-focused perspective on actor ecosystems and contrasts it with a provider-focused and a distributed perspective on ecosystems. This study demonstrates the practical usefulness of the conceptualization and provides a foundation for further research on the user’s perspective on ecosystems.

In this paper, we introduce a problem structuring method (PSM) called “Value Map”. Value Map is an extension to the Supplier Adopter Relationship Diagram in the Systemic Enterprise Architecture Method (SEAM). Value Map assists in understanding, analysis and design of value creation and capture in service systems. We illustrate the applicability of the Value Map by modeling value creation and capture in the service system of a social networking company called Webdoc. To validate the usefulness of the Value Map, we conducted an empirical study in which we also compared the Value Map to Business Model Canvas, one of the most established methods in business model design. The results of the study show that the Value Map helps business practitioners in understanding and analyzing customer value, customer value creation, and the value capture processes. We conducted an empirical study in which we assessed the usefulness of Value Map and compared it with Business Model Canvas, one of the mo...