A Service Evaluation Method for Service/Product Engineering

As a result of changes in the way consumers understand and determine value, the high value once placed on typical mass-produced products has diminished. Consequently, a new paradigm must be created to revitalize the global economy. New concepts have emerged which offer partial solutions: Service/Product Engineering (SPE) (formerly called Service Engineering), Product/Service Systems (PSS), Functional Products, and Functional Sales. In this report, a method for evaluating service solutions is proposed. Here, service evaluation is defined as an evaluation conducted by a provider during the design process in order to generate the largest value for all the concerned agents. First, a fundamental definition of service and elements for modeling a service are given. Quality Function Deployment (QFD), used widely in product design, and other mathematical methodologies are then employed. Finally, the proposed service evaluation method is used to evaluate a clothes-washing service in order to demonstrate the effectiveness of the method. In addition, a service evaluation tool based on the proposed method is described. The effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated, as is the usefulness of the tool as a structural element of a service CAD system for service design support.