The course builds on top of the material of spm4110 and assumes the material of spm4110 to be known.

The “Service Systems Engineering” course focuses on methods and tools for designing and assessing service concepts and on organisation of service processes. The course does not only pay attention to services in an interorganisational setting, such as logistic services, but also to services within organisations. Examples of such services are teaching and learning services, and coordination and collaboration services. In the course, students are confronted with the characteristics of service design in both public and private organisations in all TPM domains, and with the characteristics of service design and management in distributed, multi-actor settings.

1. Service systems design

service systems engineering framework
service concepts & business models
organisational architectures
supporting technical architectures
operational service processes, and impact on primary organisational processes
service system design methodologies
standardisation of services
evaluating services and service metrics
best practices for service design and management
2. Service applications

Several examples of service design projects will be covered throughout the course, applying the service systems engineering framework in several domains; this covers both the analysis of existing projects and the design of a new service system.

The objective of the course is to show – after general design methodologies have been covered in spm4110 – how service design differs from general design, and what specific methods and tools can be used for the design of service providing systems. After the course, students have a good theoretical background on services and service design, and they are able to apply the design guidelines for cases that are not too complex.

Lectures, discussion groups among students and teachers. Students have to work out a design for a specific service applying the material from this course and the general design course (and apply the content design and process design guidelines). Some of the lectures may be prepared and taught by groups of students.

Reader with recent papers on services, and examples of service applications. Several project descriptions of service related projects will be handed out and discussed in class.

Assingments (A) and a written examen (E). Both marks have to be >= 5,5. The final mark will be calculated by averaging A and E.

Over the past two decades, the nature of organisational work has changed, and the services industry, which produces non-tangible goods, provides the majority of jobs in The Netherlands. A key characteristic of the services industry is the high information content of its products, showing a potential for the application of ICT. The main keywords that characterise every service definition are:
transaction and intangible. The effect of the intangible nature of services on the design and management will be shown throughout the course. Service systems are usually distributed multi-actor systems, because they are location independent (intangible nature) and they have producers and consumers. Services can be found in every domain.