Facilitating Operational Control of Business Services: A Method for Analysing and Structuring Customer Integration

The efficient delivery of services is a major task for service companies to survive in competition. But, services are characterised by the integration of customers in the process of service delivery. In this context, operational control of business services is an important issue as business service performance often suffers from operational problems caused by customers involved. In order to react, a service company has to identify the possible options for operational control clearly. This is not easy as the impact of customer integration is ambiguous. To facilitate this, a method for analysing and structuring customer integration in business services is proposed. The aim is to cluster, quantify and qualify customer integration in business services from a production point of view. Applying this method (as demonstrated using a real business service) operational control will be facilitated due to a better transparency of customer integration.

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