Service Engineering Road Map of Ministry of Economy Trade and Industry in Japan

Abstract

In services, “human factors” are more crucial than in manufacturing, and hence, modeling the human functions might be very important. Service engineering can achieve the modeling of the human functions, using engineering approaches. Since service engineering deals with service, which can be provided for customers through employees, its application area includes not only service industries but also manufacturing industries that recently begin to recognize services as an important factor. Almost all the methodologies of service engineering are based on the technologies that can be developed in various fields including the manufacturing industry, and from the special characteristic of the service industry, e.g., human plays an important role. There is a lot of small- and medium-sized enterprises in the service industry and they have some restrictions of resources, then those methodologies require the following features, that is, being useful for observing human behaviors, low cost, convenience for users, high stability, and moreover, the optimization and combination of the methodologies are also important in the research field. The methodologies of service engineering can be arranged by the classification of the following four stages, (1) the observation of human behaviors in service fields (observation), (2) the analysis and modeling of data obtained in the service field (analysis), (3) the redesign of the existing service model through dialogical simulations (design), and (4) the application to the actual service (application). In this chapter, by comprehensively examining the technologies with respect to the four stages, we choose these technologies in the viewpoint of contributing to the improvement of service industries, and then show them as a technical strategy map for service engineering for the next 15 years. The technical strategy map includes some concrete important technical elements in which, for example, there exists a technique that can carry out human resource development, based on the data of the behavior of employees having high skills. In future, we will consider how to widely diffuse these technical elements using, for example, the industry-academic-government collaboration with service industries, consultants, software development companies, research institutes, universities, and government.