2013 Volume 64 Issue 1 Pages 94-105
To realize a sustainable society, there is an urgent need to find solutions and appropriate business models. In this context, services are becoming increasingly important in the manufacturing industry, since a longer life or greater added value of a product can be achieved by offering relevant services combined with a product. The authors carried out research on service design as part of the service engineering forum (SEFORUM), which is an industry-university cooperative consortium to discuss service design methodology established in 2002. In the SEFORUM, from 2008 to 2011, a project to improve a construction/maintenance service for power supply facilities was carried out. This paper reports the achievements of the project activities. The authors applied methods to support receiver-oriented service improvements through the project. Here, two kinds of methods, which were developed by the authors, were applied. The first is a method to enable service designers to acquire the receiver's requirements structure. The second is a method to identify service improvement plans that should be preferentially conducted in a service improvement. The concept of this method is to use an optimum resource allocation method. On this basis, service improvement plans are prioritized from the viewpoint of maximizing customer satisfaction. The application result shows that the first method is helpful to acquire the receiver's requirements structure easily in a step wise manner, and, the second method provides clear criteria that help designers' decision-making in service improvement design.
