An interactive method for service design has been proposed for service that heavily depends on human expertise and human performance. In this method a simulation model of the service process is to be constructed based on ethnographic field observation, and then the model is to be validated by showing simulation results to field experts in a visualized form. In the course of proposing and assessing design plans, opinions are repeatedly acquired from field experts by showing simulation results. Their expertise can be reflected in the final design plan through such an interactive design process. In order to demonstrate the effectiveness and usefulness of the proposed design method, the method was applied to ground aircraft operations at a large airport. A simulation model of the service process at the Tokyo International (Haneda) Airport was constructed, and it was demonstrated that the simulation could well replicate observed data on ground aircraft operations. It was also shown that the proposed design method is useful to create new design plans for ground aircraft operations and comparatively assess them for improving service performance.

This article focuses on analysis of the human aspect in service systems and investigates the role of creativity in enhancing service innovation. Applying the creative cognition approach, a conceptual framework of creative process for service development is constructed to demonstrate the general process of designing creative services, with the emphasis on consumer satisfaction and business success. Five strategies are proposed to facilitate creative service generation: abstraction and multi-perspective, conceptual expansion, conceptual combination, analogical thinking, and meta-design. Concrete examples are provided to illustrate the application of the general creative service design process and the proposed strategies.

Success of services businesses depend on how well the workforce is managed. Having the right size of workforce and the right skill set of the workforce at the right time under dynamic demand environments are challenges that many service businesses face. Demand disturbances in services businesses are typically managed by adjusting the resource levels such as acquiring additional resources from larger pool (borrowing resources from the corporate levels for departmental level needs), and releasing resources back to the larger pool for transferring and cross training of the workforce. However, the resource adjustments for changing the level of workforce are not as easy as acquiring or scraping materials as in manufacturing supply chain. Ineffective policies of the resource adjustment can produce undesirable effects such as oscillation between acquisition and release of workforce, and amplified oscillation through the stages of the service processes. In this work, we attempt to apply control theoretic principles in managing resources to see how various feedback control schemes can improve costs, utilization and stability of workforce. Our study indicates that effective combination of multiple feedback control schemes can produce desirable policies of workforce resource management.

In order to meet the ever-increasing demands of the market place, many organisations have sought to become more agile and flexible. One potential route to increased flexibility is home working. In a services dominant world what is less well considered, however, is the impact of such flexible work practices on co-workers, partners and customers. Some of the human resource management literature provides a positive stance, where both employee and employer benefit from home working arrangements, whereas as other studies have challenged and questioned the practice and suggest that the benefits of home working have been overstated. This paper draws on results of a case study investigation to appraise, for the various stakeholders, the benefits and costs of homeworking.

Abstract -- Service is broadly considered as an application of specialized knowledge, skill, and experience, performed for co-creation of respective values of both consumer and provider. Services are engineered and delivered through a heterogeneous service system. Compared to physical goods in manufacturing, resources, largely people (end users as the service consumer and employees as the service provider) - the main focus of a service system, cannot be held and are more complex to model and manage as people participating in service production and consumption have physiological and psychological issues, cognitive capability, and sociological constraints, etc. As the world becomes more complex and uncertain socially and economically, this research proposes a computational thinking approach to modeling of the dynamics and adaptiveness of a service system, aimed at fully leveraging today’s ubiquitous digitalized information, computing capability and computational power so that the service system can be studied qualitatively and quantitatively. Ultimately, with this foundation we will successively and successfully develop the following mechanisms to implement and enhance service systems: • A mechanism to timely capture end users’ requirements, changes, expectation and satisfaction in a variety of technical, social, and cultural aspects; • A mechanism to efficiently and cost-effectively provide employees right means and assistances to engineer services while promptly responding the changes; • A mechanism to allow involved people consciously infuse as much intelligence as possible into all levels and aspects of decision-making to assure necessary system adaptiveness for smarter operations.

Abstract -- Service science is an emerging discipline concerned with the evolution, interaction, and reciprocal cocreation of value among service systems. Service-dominant (S-D) logic is an alternative to the traditional, goods-dominant (G-D) paradigm for understanding economic exchange and value creation. This service-centered view is based on the idea that service – the application of competences for the benefit of another – is the basis of all exchange. S-D logic has been identified as an appropriate philosophical foundation for the development of service science. However, perhaps partly because S-D logic is first necessarily encountered through the G-D logic paradigm to which it runs counter, it is sometimes misinterpreted and thus misrepresented. This paper discusses S-D logic as a foundation for service science by reviewing the foundational premises of S-D logic and clarifying several misinterpretations related to 1) the S-D logic meaning of “service”, 2) the idea that all economies are service economies, and 3) the nature of value cocreation. Drawing on these clarifications, implications of an S-D logic foundation for service science are proposed.

Abstract -- The Energy Box is proposed as a 24/7 background processor operating on a local computer or in a remote location, silently managing one’s home or small business electrical energy usage hour-by-hour and even minute-by-minute. It operates best in an environment of demand-sensitive real-time pricing, now made feasible via ‘smart grid’ technology. We assume that, in time, virtually every electrical device in a home or small business will be controllable from the Energy Box. There are multiple motivations for an Energy Box: (1) By delaying or pushing forward various uses of electricity (e.g. space conditioning), widespread use of the Energy Box could ‘shave the peaks and fill in the valleys of demand,’ thereby reducing the need for capacity expansion in electrical power generation and distribution; (2) The system should result in reduced electrical energy costs to the consumer; (3) The system supports local generation, storage and sale of electricity back to the grid; (4) The system supports graceful reductions in power consumption by allowing voluntary partial load shedding as requested by the electrical utility during times of extreme high demand; (5) Requiring numerous minute-by-minute decisions over the course of a day, the system alleviates the home owner or small business manager from making such decisions, each only involving pennies but in the aggregate involving significant dollars. The primary integrating method of optimization and control is stochastic dynamic programming.

Abstract -- Service scaling is concerned with service productivity, and hyper-networks with the design of service scaling. This new model uniquely explains Internet-based economic activities, such as e-commerce/e-business and social networking, which are quintessential new genres of service for Knowledge Economy. These activities possess unprecedented promises for scaling: up (reaching the population), down (personalization), and transformational (new business designs). The concept of hyper-networks has been proposed recently by one of the authors to help explain the analytical nature of such scaling. It establishes the principle of designing multiple simultaneous layers of digital connections (networking) of persons and organizations on the same basic networks (e.g., the Internet), and interrelating them through “value worm holes” to inflate value propositions (business spaces) and enable massive, simultaneous value cocreations across the life cycles of persons and organizations. This paper further analyzes the mathematical properties of hyper-networks in the context of a person’s multiple roles in his/her life cycle, where each role sparks a particular network. Agent-based simulation experiments confirm that multi-layered networking (e.g., simultaneous multiple social networks) decreases exponentially the degrees of separation, and thereby increases the possibility for value proposition and cocreation in the community.

Abstract -- Facility Network Transformation (FNT) is a strategic approach involving assessing and optimizing the industrial facility networks such as new site selection, demand forecasting, performance evaluation in those customer oriented service industries, e.g. banking, retail, etc. In practice, FNT requirements are often diverse, dynamic and industry specific, it\'s often difficult to implement a generic FNT service fully integrated with legacy systems. The heterogeneity of spatial information further calls for a loosely coupled architecture. An innovative spatial decision support system, iFAO (Intelligent Facility Network Analytics and Optimization), is therefore developed based on Service Oriented Architecture for FNT problems. In this paper, key FNT service patterns are identified and modeled to develop an industrial independent solution, and an SOA-based framework for iFAO is proposed correspondingly. An underlying data model design is also elaborated which acts as a common language for experts from different domains to communicate and help speed up the solution development. With a real implementation case in retail, it\'s illustrated how the SOA based iFAO services are integrated to solve the real industrial problems, especially for quick decisions on business strategy in the competitive and ever-changing marketplaces.

Abstract -- As part of an ongoing study of the similarities and differences between the Goods and Services Sectors of the economy, a technique labelled “Data Surface Mining” (DSM) was used to analyze three independently generated and previously published data sets that focused on three different aspects of human resources. The three aspects are: in which economic sector to launch a career (young people), the relative presence of powerful women in the two sectors (women) and the relative presence of seniors in top positions in the two sectors (aging). Such matters are of major managerial significance in light of the fact that the Services Sector represents 80% (GDP and/or employment) of the United States economy and is of increasing importance in the global economy.