Peter Hottum

The dynamics of service productivity and value creation: a service life cycle perspective

Due to the complexity of service productivity, the extant research on the topic is scarce. Hence, there is a need for additional studies on the interdependencies of service productivity and value co-creation as well as on the development of a service life cycle model and its impact on service productivity. This paper addresses these research gaps by analysing how services should be engineered and managed to increase service productivity. It also addresses the interaction effects during the service delivery phase and the co-creation of value between service providers and customers. Case studies which were conducted in machinery industry settings evidence the applicability of the conceptual service life cycle model and demonstrate how to measure, manage and optimise service productivity in dynamic systems. The findings show that it is crucial to analyse value co-creation throughout the service process in order to increase and measure service productivity. It is also essential to consider the characteristics of the service life cycle on service productivity. Finally, implications for service companies are discussed.

Customer Integration in Service Innovation: An Exploratory Study

Prominent industry projects, as well as an extensive literature suggest the importance of customer integration for companies’ innovation success. This appears to be especially true for service firms, which inherently build on customer interaction. Despite this appreciation of the approach, there are comparably few empirical analyses of the positive and negative effects of customer integration. In this exploratory study, we build on established customer role concepts to study the status quo of customer integration in industry, as well as reservations against the roles and negative experiences from customer integration projects. The study reveals a gap between reservations and actual negative experiences in losing know-how, as well as a positive effect of experience in customer integration on perceived benefits for the company.

Towards a Framework of Influence Factors for Value Co-creation in Service Systems

According to modern service science theory, value is jointly generated by several partners forming a service system. In this work, we focus on a simple two-party system consisting of a service provider and its customer. The value created by this service system hinges on the contribution of both parties. That is, it also depends on the collaboration of the customer, which is a key characteristic of services in traditional definitions. Providers, however, lack knowledge on how to identify and measure the influence factors for value co-creation, such as customer contribution. Being aware of customer contribution, providers could design and manage value propositions purposefully. In this work, we provide a first version of a framework of influence factors for value co-creation in service systems, which may serve providers as a guideline for identifying different types of customer contribution.

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.

Management der Interaktionsqualität in industriellen Dienstleistungsnetzwerken : Ein Service-Analytics-Ansatz für die Störungsbearbeitung

ZusammenfassungDie gemeinschaftliche Erstellung von Leistungen in industriellen Dienstleistungsnetzwerken erfordert die Interaktion zwischen den beteiligten Akteuren über zahlreiche Schnittstellen hinweg. In der vorliegenden Fallstudie aus dem Bereich der Informationstechnologie wird ein Ausschnitt aus einem solchen Netzwerk analysiert. Ein explorativer Ansatz maschinellen Lernens wird angewandt, um die Qualität kundenseitiger Störungsmeldungen messbar zu machen, sodass diese Information für eine effektivere weitere Bearbeitung im Netzwerk genutzt werden kann. Es wird gezeigt, dass durch diesen Service-Analytics-Ansatz eine systematische und automatisierte Einschätzung der Qualität erfolgen kann, die einerseits bereits als solche zu operativen Verbesserungen im Leistungserstellungsprozess führen, andererseits auch die Grundlage eines gezielten Prozesses zur strategischen Verbesserung der Interaktionsqualität bilden kann.AbstractThe collaborative design and delivery of offerings in industrial service networks requires interaction of its actors across various interfaces. This IT industry case study analyzes a subset of such a network: it applies an exploratory machine learning approach to assess the quality of customer IT incident tickets in order to more effectively use this information for subsequent tasks in the network. It is shown that the service analytics approach can render systematic and automated assessments of interaction quality. This can be used both for operative process improvements as well as for strategic actions to raise interaction quality.

Towards Designing an Assistant for Semi-Automatic EMS Dispatching

Many Emergency Medical Service (EMS) systems worldwide handle emergency rescues as well as patient transports and dispatchers need to assign ambulances to incidents manually throughout the day. The management of the complex system together with the manual assignments can easily create stress for and pressure on the dispatchers. Mathematical algorithms can help improving the dispatching quality, but then dispatchers still need to choose the best-fitting algorithm and furthermore, trust the algorithm’s dispatching suggestion. We propose an assistant that can support the EMS dispatchers. The assistant offers explanations for the choice of the algorithm as well as the dispatching suggestion in order to increase the dispatchers’ trust and decrease their stress. We ground the assistant’s design in Information Systems as well as Operations Research literature and thus, show how interdisciplinary service research can contribute in designing artefacts for complex service systems to solve real-world problems.

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.

Towards a Customer-Oriented Queuing in Service Incident Management

The provision of services hinges considerably on the contribution of the provider and the customer and—if present—on their involved networks. In this paper we focus on incident management—a service domain that is highly relevant for all kinds of industries and is described from a provider internal perspective in the ITIL documentation.

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.

Barriers to service innovation - perspectives from research and practice

This paper reviews the barriers to service innovation and builds a new framework to cluster them. It identifies new areas of interest as it compares the range of barriers from the perspective of research and practice. Therefore we collected empirical data about barriers from industry and research representatives and reflected them by the ones cited in literature. This analysis results in outlining conflicting views, lack of scientific research about barriers in service innovations and service specific barriers like service orientated thinking. Furthermore, results suggest industry dependency of barriers and underlie visible limitations.