Germany: Service Engineering

Although new service development is now a high-priority topic,¹ it was not a prominent focus in the past of either business or engineering research. Since 1995, the Fraunhofer Institute for Industrial Engineering has studied the transfer and application of engineering science know-how to the service sector. Service engineering focuses on the systematic development and design of service products and service systems using interdisciplinary models, methods, and tools.

How should we go about developing services? And how can this process explicitly be supported? These are two of the central issues in service engineering.

Closing the gap from idea to realization of new services is the focus of both development of new service products and the design of the development system.

Three dimensions (structure, process, and outcome) are key elements. The results of service development are resource models, process models, and product models. Resource models group together development tasks that describe the provision of services. Process models aim to create transparency at the early stage and achieve the greatest possible process efficiency before the service is actually offered. Product models provide a description of the characteristics of the service.

The field of service engineering evolved in connection with the Services for the 21st Century Initiative funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research. At the Sixth Annual German Service Conference recently held in Berlin, the Federal Ministry of Education and Research announced an expanded service research program "Innovation with Services" with 70 million Euros budgeted. The latest outcomes of service research activities can be monitored on the DL2100 Internet platform run by the Fraunhofer Institute for Industrial Engineering (www.dl2100.de).

Further research work will investigate the organizational grounding of service engineering in companies and identify the organizational forms that are best suited to the task of supporting service development. Also, to speed up product development in the service sector, service prototyping will only be feasible in practice if service concepts can be simulated and tested at a very early development phase—much more effectively than has been the case in the past.

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