Service conflict identification and resolution for design of product–service offerings

• We propose a systematic method to identify and resolve service design conflicts.
• Service function and attribute analysis is proposed to elicit service attributes.
• It can describe both concurrent and dependent relationships between functions.
• Unbalanced linguistic label set is utilized in group decision making of conflicts.
• TRIZ methodology is introduced to resolve the identified service conflicts.

Many manufacturers today are striving to provide high value-added product–service offerings (PSO) to their customers. PSO has heterogonous structure and various requirements, which may lead to technical attributes’ conflicts during the design process. The conflicts will lead to the difficulty of concept generation, increase of service delivery failure, and eventually the decrease of customer satisfaction. However, the conflicts in PSO design areas are more intangible and harder to formulate. Moreover, those conflicts are often resolved with trial and error methods in ad hoc processes, which largely depend on the designer’s intuition. Thus, in this paper, the authors propose a systematic method to identify PSO design conflicts and resolve them. The proposed method is based on the approach of service function and attributes analysis, group decision making with unbalanced linguistic label set and TRIZ methodology. In addition, a case study of design conflict identification and resolution for elevator service reveals the feasibility and potentials of the proposed method.