Advances in Services Innovations

Inhaltsverzeichnis * Preface V I Service Engineering 1 Service Engineering: State of the Art and Future Trends 3 Klaus-Peter Fähnrich1, Thomas Meiren2 3 1 Introduction 4 1 Introduction 4 1.1 Standing out from the competition through innovative services 4 1.2 Services as an R&D object 5 2 Fundamental aspects of developing a service 7 2.1 Model for developing services 7 2.2 Use of methods and tools 9 3 Organisation of service development 11 3.1 Basic organisational alternatives 11 3.2 Dissemination in practice 12 4 Outlook 14 References 14 The Palm/Erlang-A Queue, with Applications to Call Centers 17 Avishai Mandelbaum, Sergey Zeltyn 17 1 Introduction 18 1 Introduction 18 2 Significance of abandonment in modelling and practice 20 3 Birth-and-death process representation 22 4 Operational measures of performance 24 4.1 Practical measures: accounting for Abandonment 24 4.2 Calculations: the 4CallCenters software 25 4.3 A general approach for computing operational performance measures 26 4.4 Relation between average wait and the fraction abandoning 27 5 Parameter estimation in a call center environment 28 6 Approximations 30 7 Applications to call centers 33 7.1 Erlang-A performance measures: comparison against real data 33 7.2 Erlang-A approximations: comparison against real data 34 8 Some advanced features of 4CallCenters 35 9 Some open research topics 38 9.1 Cost and revenue analysis 38 9.2 Extending Erlang-A: human behavior 40 9.3 Extending Erlang-A: structure of modern call centers 42 9.4 Uncertainty in parameter values 43 References 43 The Erlang-A queue: Useful formulae for the steady-state distribution and some performancemeasures 46 The Design and Development of Industrial Service Work 49 Holger Luczak, Christian Gill and Bernhard Sander 49 1 Introduction 50 2 Service Engineering as a New Research Discipline for Successful Service Design and Service Development 50 3 Service Planning for Promising Service Ideas 52 4 An Architecture for Service Conception 53

Professor Dieter Spath is the head and Walter Ganz the Director of the Fraunhofer Institute IAO, Stuttgart.