Engineering Industrial Service Systems : Design and Evaluation of System-Oriented Service Delivery

Driven through ever increasing cost pressure, service providers rely on complex information and optimization systems to increase their operational efficiency. Those systems, however, typically optimize from a provider perspective and, thus, neglect potential for cost reduction on the customer side. Therefore, current approaches to increase operational efficiency result in an inefficient resource allocation from a system's perspective.

We address this issue by designing and evaluating a novel method---system-oriented service delivery (SOSD). We follow a stringent Design Science Research approach and ground our work in an analysis of current practice as well as draw upon the kernel theories of service system engineering and mechanism design. In addition to evaluations for effectiveness and illustration, we perform a naturalistic evaluation capturing expert feedback on the proposed method.

Thus, we contribute a new method with high practical potential to the service system engineering discipline as well as the industrial maintenance domain. In addition, we explore reception in industry and further improvement areas for future design cycles to improve SOSD's implementability.