Service-Oriented Analysis of Logistics Services

The production of goods and services has the common target to satisfy the needs of the customers. In contrast to goods, the modeling of services is connected with additional challenges. This involves finding models, which describe the content of services and reflect their complex nature. The complexity is founded on service characteristics like composition, heterogeneity and inheritance. With the growing economic importance of services, the companies need solutions for service management. These tools should enable them to describe services, to compare services and to manage them as it is standard for products. Service management is not only important for companies out of the service sector. To manufacture products different services like engineering or logistics are necessary. In this paper we describe our service modeling approach which is based on two assumptions. The first one relates to the fact that the content of a service is defined by the value for the customer. The second assumption reflects the fact that the content of a service can be described by the entities and their relations, which are necessary to produce it. To get service models we investigate the production process of services and how the provision of services is carried out. We made a first prove of our concept with logistics services of a manufacturing company. The results are described in this paper.