Title: A method for platform identification to support service family design

Authors: Seung Ki Moon, Timothy W. Simpson, Jun Shu, Soundar R.T. Kumara

Addresses: Department of Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering, The Pennsylvania State University, 233 Leonhard Building, University Park, PA 16802, USA. ' Department of Mechanical & Nuclear Engineering and The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA 16802, USA; Department of Industrial & Manufacturing Engineering, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA 16802, USA. ' Department of Supply Chain and Information System, The SMEAL College of Business, The Pennsylvania State University, 462 Business Building, University Park, PA 16802, USA. ' Department of Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering, The Pennsylvania State University, 363 Leonhard Building, University Park, PA 16802, USA

Abstract: Customised services are an important source of revenue for many companies, particularly those subscribing to mass customisation where customer satisfaction is paramount. In this paper, we extend concepts from platform-based product family design to create a new method for module-based service family design. The objective in this research is to introduce a method for identifying a service platform along with variant and unique modules to create a service family by integrating object-oriented concepts, ontologies and data-mining techniques. Object-oriented concepts were used to support service analysis and representation combining ontologies. Fuzzy clustering is employed to partition service processes into subsets to identify common modules – the platform – and specific modules for the given service family. To demonstrate the proposed approach, we apply the proposed method to select a platform for a family of banking services.

Keywords: service family design; platform design; object-oriented concepts; ontology; data mining; service families; customised services; mass customisation; customer satisfaction; service platforms; fuzzy clustering; banking services.

DOI: 10.1504/IJSOI.2008.021341

International Journal of Services Operations and Informatics, 2008 Vol.3 No.3/4, pp.294 - 317

Published online: 19 Nov 2008 *

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