Advanced Japanese Service Design: From Elements to Relations

Abstract

Service is nowadays regarded as a way to achieve the “sustainability” of businesses in manufacturing companies. The Service Engineering Forum (SEFORUM) was established in 2002 as an industry-academic cooperative consortium to advance service engineering research (see http://www.service-eng.org/). In the third period of the SEFORUM (2008–2011), engineering methods to support a service design process were proposed and applied to plural actual services. This work reports these SEFORUM activities. In this work, methods to support the service design process, which is composed of the three phases, requirement analysis, service conceptual design, and service detailed design, are proposed. In addition, the results of the case studies of these methods are also reported. An overview of the methods for each phase follows.

For the requirement analysis, in which designers define the target customer categories and extract the requirements, a method for negotiating various customer demands is introduced. This method enables designers to analyze various customer requirements and to effectively prioritize them. For prioritization, this method relies on group decision-making, in which a plan is proposed to minimize overall dissatisfaction (group decision-making stress) of all group members on the basis of an original evaluation of the decision-makers and their priority. In the case study, this method is applied to an elevator renewal service for a condominium building in which its residents correspond to customers. The purpose of this case study is to analyze and prioritize resident requirements.

For the service conceptual design, in which designers develop function structures that meet customer requirements, this work introduces a web-based database that enables designers to acquire knowledge on the web. In the case study, this tool is applied to an elevator renewal service. The purpose of this case study is to develop way-out functions of the elevator renewal service by the designer who takes responsibilities for the development of elevator renewal services.

For the detailed design, in which designers determine stakeholders involved in a designed service and allocate resources for which each stakeholder takes responsibility, an optimal resource allocation method is introduced. In this method, the limited resources of the service providers are optimally allocated to each improvement plan for the purpose of maximizing customer satisfaction. Based on the results of the allocations, the improvement plan can be quantitatively prioritized. In the case study, the method is applied to an actual service, a facility construction, and maintenance service for an electronic substation, in which a utility company is a service customer. The purpose of this case study is to obtain the information about which improvement plans should be preferentially addressed in the service improvement.