Safety Alarm Systems and Related Services

This paper examines an assistive technology targeted to ageing people: a safety alarm and the related service system. A safety alarm is not only a technical device; with the related system, it can be seen as a holistic opportunity for innovation. The operation of safety alarm systems and services depends on many critical points. Potholes lying in safety alarm systems are identified in this study, taking into account the technology, services and organizational network. The potholes are studied as sources and opportunities for potential innovation. Service, social, organizational, process and marketing innovations—combined with technology—are significant parts of innovation activity related to the ageing population. A technical device is not used in a vacuum: there is also organization and service acts, as well as the user with her or his values, appreciations, state of health, and so forth. These factors impact the variety of innovation potential in assistive technology. This paper examines the existing technology and related services as well as various innovation opportunities related to uncovering their shortcomings.

A Structured Test Approach for Service Concepts

To assure new services attain a certain level of quality, services should be developed and tested systematically like products or software. In practice, this is rarely the case, especially in regards to the testing of service concepts due to appropriate solutions, processes, and methodology seem to be missing. In this paper, the authors propose an approach to how service testing can be realized in practice and present supporting processes, methods, and technologies for testing services in laboratory environments.

Service Science, Management and Engineering Education

Service Science, Management and Engineering (SSME) is an emerging discipline which studies service industry under an integrated framework. SSME education trains scientists and skilled service workers to promote innovation and productivity in service industry. Although quite a number of universities started SSME programs years ago, most of them are still in the stage of experiment, and only address a small portion of the total subject. This paper first discusses the objectives of SSME education program—the abilities that service workers and scientists should have. Then, three types of foundation courses of the current programs are discussed in depth; the bachelor, master and PhD degree programs offered currently are analyzed, which include the course contents and teaching methods. Based on the inspirations from these practical programs, a unified model for SSME education is developed and presented, which proposes to unify bachelor, master and PhD programs, and establishes a new service science department comprising areas of service management, service engineering and design, service arts and humanities.

Fundamental Patterns for Enterprise Integration Services

Enterprise integration projects link or merge artifacts across many functions, processes and management levels in a company or government agency. In the absence of methods generic enough to cover the diverse range of enterprise integration projects and adaptable enough to support specific projects effectively, integration services promise to constitute a suitable “middle layer”. Since patterns and reference models could serve as such a middle layer, existing work in the fields of patterns in computer science and reference modeling in information systems engineering is analyzed. In a bottom-up manner, alignment, derivation, binding and merge are proposed as fundamental patterns for enterprise integration. Integration services are identified as integration tasks associated with these base patterns. Such integration services are clustered into enterprise integration patterns that serve as fragments for composing a context and project type specific enterprise integration project. Two case studies illustrate the concept and gain initial validation insights.

Pricing Integrated Customer Solutions

Integrating products and services to customized solutions can help firms differentiate from their competitors. In practice, however, various companies fall short in extracting value from their customers. Therefore, this paper focuses on pricing aspects as central means for value appropriation in the context of solutions. Following the resource-based view of the firm, the authors adopt a process-oriented perspective on pricing practices in order to identify crucial factors and activities. Based on 15 in-depth interviews with practitioners from various industries, this paper derives six steps of a price management process for value appropriation in the context of solution selling and presents critical activities and routines within each step.

Supermarket Service Modeling and Evaluation

Supermarkets face the problems of customer queuing and SCM optimizing. Even a series of supermarket service models are adopted currently; however, these issues still exist. This paper examines the framework of this popular service and proposes a quantitive supermarket service metric for evaluation. It introduces three existing supermarket service models and propounds a new hybrid model on the point of improvement which is an integration of e-supermarket and typical model, concentrating on self-service and automated service. The paper gives detailed analysis and comparisons based on Game Theory and simulated experiment by expressions separately for customer, supermarket and supplier and proves the superior feature of the hybrid model. It also suggests a feasible solution using RFID and explains the solution to the biggest challenge about backend bottleneck.

Service Composition Based Software Solution Design

Service composition and Web mash-up are promising for meeting specific business requirements by integrating multiple distributed services and SaaS (Software as a Service) has become a popular way of software development and delivery paradigm. An application that meets the business challenges the customer faces in managing its supply chain by integrating two existing SaaS offerings into a newly developed technology presented to validate the service composition technologies. This paper contributes with a practice of a light weight approach of the problems that are inevitable in SaaS integration such as data synchronization, process control, and identification. The purpose of this paper tries to provide a reference for researchers and engineers in this domain.

An Approach to Deploying SOA in Technological Information Integration

The growing need for the integrated usage of information from different sources has led to the requirement for information integration. This paper proposes a business-oriented SOA deployment approach, which is derived from a real world project, for the agencies of technology to provide value-added services through integrating the existing information resources. In the approach, information services, which are supposed to be identified in accordance with information category standard, are created and used in a resource-centric way, and the concept of business service is brought out for domain users to ease the usage of information services by modeling business context and IT information coherently. Based on business services, a domain-specific service mash-up language is provided to “program” information integration applications, and the corresponding run-time support is built to parse the applications and execute business services in mediation-style architecture. The system implementation and the application of our approach are also given.

Modeling of Service Systems

An important aspect in the field of service science is service modeling; however, no comprehensive modeling approach exists. In this regard, the authors analyze literature of service science and look at existing modeling approaches. Based on this analysis they identify concepts necessary for modeling services. This paper specifies a semi-formalized meta-model comprising the concepts found and for having a more applicable meta-model, the authors transfer it into a technical space. Additionally a concrete syntax and implemented an editor, which supports service modeling, is specified. Overall, this work comprises existing approaches and presents a well-structured formalized meta-model for the domain of service modeling. This meta-model may be used as a starting point for further research within the area of service modeling.

Using System Dynamics to Analyze Customer Experience Design

Today, customer experience design is an emerging research direction in the experience economy where good customer experiences can lead service providers to achieve their business goals. Customer expectation, another key point for designing service experiences, affects how customers really feel during service experience delivery, while service operation is another important factor must be taken into account. System dynamics, as an analytic tool, can provide designers with a different way of thinking by integrating these factors for customer experience design. Accordingly, this study not only models the process of customer experience design by using causal loop diagrams and stock and flow diagrams, but also analyzes how the feedback and time delay factors influence customer experience design based on the simulation results of system dynamics. According to the macro viewpoint of system dynamics, this paper analyzes these important factors within customer experience design.