Open Access

Nowadays, providing purchasable goods is not enough for a company to survive on the global market. Because of competitive prices and a large range of products available, companies need to offer additional benefits to their customers in order to create a unique selling point. They add services to their product portfolio and offer clients the opportunity to acquire an additional service solution to go with it. The offered services need to fit to the customer's needs, resulting in a variety of available services, great complexity of the service range and decreasing transparency of the resource utilization. This paper addresses the problem by identifying variant-creating factors in product service systems, transferring them into an organizational framework and verifying their significance.

Industry 4.0 has provided vast opportunities for manufacturing companies whilst simultaneously creating multiple challenges. In this new highly digitized globalized marketplace, manufacturing companies find themselves under pressure to become more service oriented and offer new innovative value offerings such as smart services. These are digital data-driven services that, generally, add value in conjunction with a physical product. However, classical methods of service engineering have not adapted sufficiently to the increasing digital components and requirements of smart services. This paper presents Smart Service Engineering as a novel service-engineering approach for industrial smart services. Smart Service Engineering draws from iterative development models and implements agile and customer-centric methods to decrease the overall development time and achieve an early market success. The paper focuses on the service development steps and presents the interaction and interconnection of different elements of smart services based on a case study research. Finally the paper illustrates the successful application of the Smart Service Engineering approach and its impact on a German medium-sized company in the textile machine industry.

Since the field of service engineering emerged in the late 20th century, the service industry has undergone drastic changes. Among the reasons for these changes is the increasing digitalization, which has made it difficult for companies to successfully develop new service offerings. While numerous service engineering models are available to provide guidance during the design of new services, many of them cannot keep up with the requirements of today’s economic environment. The present paper examines the requirements that service engineering models need to meet in order to be suitable guidelines for the digital age. To this end, the introduction illustrates how digitalization has changed the service industry. Afterwards, selected service engineering models and related norms are presented. Finally, a set of requirements for modern service engineering models derived from best practices from recent years is introduced.

Viele Branchen stehen am Anfang der digitalen Transformation bzw. werden bereits grundlegend von ihr verändert. Im Zeitalter der digitalen Transformation steht somit die Frage im Mittelpunkt, wie Unternehmen die notwendigen Veränderungen angehen und den Erfolg der Transformation gewährleisten können. Datenbasierte Dienstleistungen sind dabei ein konsequenter nächster Schritt im Wandel der Unternehmen vom Investitionsgüterhersteller zum Lösungsanbieter. Nichtsdestotrotz scheitern viele Premiumhersteller trotz ihrer hohen digitalen Wettbewerbsfähigkeit bei der Entwicklung und Einführung von datenbasierten Dienstleistungen. Der Beitrag zeigt zunächst Merkmale und Ausprägungen datenbasierter Dienstleistungen auf. Da sich die klassischen Methoden des Service Engineerings nicht ausreichend schnell an digitalisierte Komponenten und geänderte Voraussetzungen angepasst haben, wird mit dem Smart Service Engineering ein neuer Ansatz vorgestellt, der agile und kundenorientierte Methoden implementiert. Zuletzt werden Muster und Entwicklungspfade der digitalen Transformation detailliert analysiert und Handlungsempfehlungen für Anbieter datenbasierter Dienstleistungen abgeleitet.

Im Preiskampfversuchen viele Produkt- und Serviceanbieter, sich durch Kundenindividualisierung van den Wettbewerbern zu differenzieren. Es stellt sich jedoch die Frage, wann sich der fur eine weitere Variante im Portfolio entstehende Mehraufwand lohnt. Welche Varianten sind uberhaupt profitabel und welche nicht? Wie verhalt sich die Profitabilitat des gesamten Portfolios, wenn eine oder mehrere Varianten nicht mehr angeboten werden?