Johannes Kunze von Bischhoffshausen

Towards an IT-Based Coordination Platform for the German Emergency Medical Service System

The German healthcare service system is facing a number of challenges in the years to come, prominent among these a decreasing number of hospitals and practices dealing with an increasing number of treatments and patient transportation tasks. In this paper, we introduce the idea of building a decision support tool to improve scheduling of patient transportation in the German Emergency Medical Service (EMS) system to reduce waiting times and costs, as well as increasing reliability. We outline a service platform on which the decision support tool could be realized and integrated with existing systems in EMS coordination centers. The paper thus introduces a promising approach for one of the main challenges of the German EMS system and builds the basis for further research on transport scheduling and healthcare services.

Interrelations of Success Factors for Selling Product-Service Systems from a Solution Sales Perspective

Many Business-to-Business (B2B) companies are shifting their focus from transactional selling to engaging in long-lasting relationships with their customers. This impacts how companies sell their products and services. Instead of selling isolated products and services in single transactions, companies bundle and individualize their products and service to address individual customer needs. These bundles are called product-service systems (PSS) or solutions. This work reflects the current body of knowledge on selling PSS based on a literature review and provides new insights based on a qualitative study conducted with three multinational B2B companies providing PSS. Our findings propose that companies struggle to profit from PSS with a variety of different reasons. Implications on PSS itself are not quantified easily due to high variability of accounting practice regarding PSS and their service components. Furthermore, according to our interview results, for achieving long-term success with PSS three factors and their interrelations are critically important. First, PSS must fit into the targeted market strategy. Second, PSS and the market strategy must be consequently implemented within the organizational structure and the conduct of day-to-day business. Third, PSS providers have to deal with complexity which PSS comprise.

An Information System for Sales Team Assignments Utilizing Predictive and Prescriptive Analytics

Many companies have transformed their businesses from selling products in isolated transactions to selling solutions in long-term relationships. This transformation poses new requirements for designing the sales force structure: solution selling companies often approach the customer with sales teams, composed of different sales roles with specific responsibilities and skills. However, little attention is given to this challenge in sales force analytics, especially from an information systems research perspective. In particular, there is still a lack of decision support with regard to assigning sales reps to customer accounts in a solution selling setting. This work addresses this research gap by proposing an information system for planning sales force assignments utilizing predictive and prescriptive analytics. The information system integrates a predictive component which applies mining of historical sales data in order to predict the sales impact for any particular assignment of sales teams to customer accounts. Furthermore, the information system integrates a prescriptive component which utilizes a linear programming model to compute the optimal assignment that maximizes revenue. This work presents the prototypical implementation of this approach and, thus, develops an artifact that integrates predictive and prescriptive analytics into an information system. The derived solution offers a promising approach for increasing the sales effectiveness of solution selling firms.

Field Service Technician Management 4.0

Models for workforce planning and scheduling have been studied in operations research for decades. Driven by the Industrial Internet of Things new data sources have become available that have not yet been used to improve field service management. This paper proposes a research agenda towards leveraging this potential in the context of industrial maintenance. By combining predictive analytics (e.g. forecasting demand) with prescriptive analytics (e.g. determining optimal maintenance schedules) companies can decrease uncertainties in their maintenance planning, increase the availability of machines, decrease overall maintenance costs, and ultimately develop new business models.

Service Science Textbooks: Opportunities of an Interdisciplinary Approach

With the rise of service science, management and engineering as an independent and interdisciplinary research school, several courses and entire study programs emerged in several universities around the world. Several textbooks address teaching service science from the perspective of a specific discipline such as marketing, operations management or computer science. Therefore, so far teaching service science requires the preparation and combination of lecture material from different textbooks and other teaching material, since there was a lack of interdisciplinary and integrated textbooks for teaching service science. This paper reviews existing service textbooks for motivating the need for an integrated service science textbook. Furthermore, the outline of a new forthcoming interdisciplinary service science textbook is presented. This textbook integrates several disciplines, such as business and economics, quantitative sciences, and computer science. The textbook therefore provides an interdisciplinary map of the world of service science that conquers the challenges to explain service systems to students and practitioners. This enables lecturers to organize their courses along a comprehensive and integrated course concept which has been the result of teaching service science at universities for several years.

Service Co-creation

This chapter provides an overview on different aspects of co-creation in a service context. The first section introduces the concept of value co-creation in service systems and elaborates on the relationship of co-creation to service value propositions, service encounters, service quality, and service productivity. Furthermore, it introduces the concept of customer relationships, as well as concepts and methods that can be applied in order to manage these relationships for co-creation with customers. The third section elaborates on the different roles a customer can play within service co-creation, and its managerial implications.

Service System Analytics: Cost Prediction

Services become every day more important for society. Cost prediction is one important aspect which has not received the required attention. Nonetheless, its impact on the economic success of service-based industries is considerable and, so, it cannot be overlooked. Therefore, in this paper we tackle the problem of cost prediction of service systems. Since previous work generally followed an ad hoc approach, we present a three layered approach based on customer factors to measure customer involvement since it is a good predictor for service cost. Service co-creation between customer and provider is the central concept of our costing approach. For service modelling we use Linked USDL, and to reason on costing data we use methods from service analytics. On the one hand, we reduce the uncertainty introduced by customers and can predict more accurate service costs. On the other hand, the systematic approach enables a better understanding of the costing problem and the service systems under study, and increases reusability of service analytics algorithms.

Towards a Personal Relationship-Based Assignment of Client Representatives to Accounts

Business-to-Business (B2B) companies are evolving from selling products towards engaging in long-lasting relationships to co-create value. This shift changes the role of the client rep from being a sales representative to being a value creator and manager of the relationship between both firms. The quality of the established personal relationship between the client rep and the account firms is thereby a critical determinant of future business success for B2B companies. Therefore, leveraging these established relationships is a crucial task in sales management - but can constitute a complex organizational challenge.