Configurative Service Engineering - A Rule-Based Configuration Approach for Versatile Service Processes in Corrective Maintenance

Recently, service orientation has increasingly been debated both in research and practice. While researchers postulate a paradigm shift towards services as the basic unit of exchange in economies, companies strive to efficiently provide a wide array of business services to their customers. To accomplish this, companies (a) are required to consciously design the services in their portfolio with respect to a structured engineering approach and (b) also have to flexibly adapt the engineered service processes to individual customer needs, wants, and demands. Hence, services shall be supplied efficiently and in consistent quality without sacrificing customization for customers. Supporting this mass-customization strategy for business services, we present a configurative service engineering approach. After engineering a configurable process model for business services, customized service processes can efficiently be derived from the model by applying configuration mechanisms. The process of configuration is aided by the software tool Adapt(X). We present the concept and tool support by applying them on business services for corrective maintenance in the mechanical engineering sector.