Service Engineering: a novel engineering discipline for producers to increase value combining service and product

In order to pursue sustainability, commercial activities between the supply and demand sides must be somehow changed. In the context of eco-design, producers must need a much bigger framework than is available in current eco-design techniques. This calls for establishing a new discipline. This paper aims at proposing a novel engineering discipline for producers toward sustainable production and consumption, Service Engineering (SE). For the sake of this, the scheme of SE is first explained. Second, a methodology of modeling and designing services, and a computer-aided design tool called Service Explorer, are presented. Third, they are proved to be effective through two applications. In SE, positive and negative changes of consumers are modelled as value and cost, respectively. In addition, the model to describe a target consumer is provided for grounding the identified value. A design methodology including the identification of value with realization structures is also provided. Furthermore, SE allows designing services in parallel with products. In the application to service redesign of an existing hotel in Italy, it was demonstrated that the presented methods and tools facilitate designers adding new value like the view of outside through a window in energy-saving structure. It was also proven to deal with both products and services through generating a solution called “cash-back per non-wash” system for washing towels. The other smaller-scaled application to design of renting home appliances revealed that they support to determine a property of an adopted physical product like the size of a TV set depending on target customers’ properties effectively.