Process Standardization to Support Service Process Assessment and Re-engineering

Service Engineering (SE) discipline is currently supporting companies during the engineering and re-engineering phases of their service offering. With the support of SE methods, companies can undertake their servitization journey with the best premise to gain as well as deliver value to their customers. For this purpose, the Service Engineering Methodology (SEEM) has been proposed. The SEEM entails methods to design service concepts and processes capable of balancing value between customers and the company. Some industrial cases, carried out in collaboration with ABB, a leading provider in power and automation technology, demonstrate the effectiveness of such methodology in the re-engineering of existing services in B2B context. Despite that, the cases show that the SEEM application is time consuming, especially in the validation of the service provision process. Thus, in order to facilitate and speed up the implementation of the methodology, a standard process for service provision becomes relevant. Then, starting from the re-engineering of the existing product-oriented services offered by ABB, this paper aims at laying the foundation for the definition of a reference model and a standard process model for product-oriented service delivery. The results will support the SEEM adoption and the definition of service processes avoiding the design of customized models, that cannot be compared and adapted to different realities. In line with what has been found in literature, the definition of a possible reference model and a preliminary standard process model are presented.