March paper on 'A Service Network Perspective to Evaluate Service Matching in Early Design' by Federico Barravecchia, Fiorenzo Franceschini, Luca Mastrogiacomo
Typically, companies struggle to differentiate their offer from others in a crowded market and new service-oriented strategies are often proposed to gain a competitive advantage. This paper introduces the concept of service network as a network of interconnected service systems which exchange resources and customers, achieving similar or different outcomes, and propose similar or different value propositions. Performances of a service system could be influenced by the other service systems that compose the network. Many cases of service networks can be observed in different contexts. The design of a service network necessarily includes actions aimed at the assessment of the relationships resulting from the service matching process, i.e. the process of combining a new service with one or more existing services. The aim of this paper is to present Service Relationship Deployment (SRD), a tool to support service designers when dealing with the service matching problem. Three key factors are considered to capture the essence of the SRD method: (i) the study of service networks based on a systematic approach that considers perceived quality; (ii) the analysis of the possible effects of a service matching on customers and on operational and protection resources (iii) a step toward incremental innovations based on the optimization of service relationships and on resource integration.