Condiciones de trabajo

A service can be described as: all intangible effects resulting from a client interaction that creates and captures value (ERISS, 2016). Currently, services combine both

products and services, and the distinction between the two is fuzzy and vague. Services are offered by a provider to its consumers. Baida et al. (2004) defined business services as activities delivered by a service provider to a service consumer to create a value for the consumer. Business services are typically discovered and invoked manually, but their realization may be performed by automated or manual means. Services lack of concrete characteristics. Thus, services must be defined indirectly in terms of the effects they have on consumers. This makes the description of services one of the most important undertakings for the future.

Service knowledge is an area of expertise which involves: business, management,

industrial engineering, information and communication technology (ICT), socio-legal sciences, and economics. Service science has developed in response to the need to combine technological and non-technological innovations in a rapidly growing and changing environment. The discipline focuses on the innovative creation of value by using various transdisciplinary approaches. A service-dominant approach is starting to take over from the traditional goods-dominant approach. Main key factors of the

service-dominant approach include:

• the realization of a service as a process,

• a focus on dynamic resources,

• outsourcing and globalization,

• complex interdependences between elements.

Service science, management, and engineering (SSME) is a term introduced by IBM

to describe service science, an interdisciplinary approach to the study, design, and implementation of service complex systems in which specific arrangements of people and technologies take actions that provide value for others. SSME has been defined as the application of science, management, and engineering disciplines to tasks that one organization beneficially performs for and with another (Sampson 2010). A Service

System is a term that frequently appears in the service management, service

operations, services marketing, service design, and service engineering literatures (Salvendy and Karwowski 2010). Service involves both a provider and a client working together to create value. These relationships and dependencies can be viewed as a complex system in which the parts interact with each other in a non-linear manner, and which have emergent properties. In many cases, the main source of complexity in a service system is its people: the client, the provider, or other organizations.

Service engineering is a new methodology to the analysis, design and implementation

of service-based ecosystems in which organizations and IT provide value for others in the form of services. Service Engineering not only provides methodologies to handle the increased complexity of numerous business actors and their value exchanges, but also provides tools for constructing and deploying services that merge the IT and business perspectives (Cardoso et al. 2009). Service Engineering is a structured approach for describing a part of an organization from a service perspective that expresses the way the organization works (Salvendy and Karwowski 2010). It provides a discipline for using models and techniques to guide the understanding, structure, design, implementation, deployment, documentation, operation,

maintenance and modification of typical services as well as e-services. This approach should systematically translate an initial description from a natural language that expresses the way stakeholders think and communicate about the organization through a sequence of representations using various models to a representation that is accepted and understood by all the participants of the system.

The fast-growing discipline of service engineering is related to service economy growth and the global need for innovation, developing and implementing of different kinds of services (Sampson 2010). Often the biggest problem lies in bridging the gap between business and IT. This challenge requires a set of design principles, patterns, and techniques that currently have not been identified precisely enough. Therefore, the Internet of Services cannot be realized without giving a strong emphasis on both the business as well as the technological side of services.

The Unified Service Theory (UST) developed by Scott E. Sampson could serve as

theoretical background for building the general model of Service Engineering. The basis for a UST is the assumption that: “Services are production processes wherein

each customer supplies one or more input components for that customer’s unit of production” (Sampson 2010). The concept of a process is defined in standards (e.g.

EN ISO 9000:2015 and EN ISO 9001:2015) and in professional literature in a variety of ways. On the basis of considerations made in previous sections, it is proposed to adopt two types of process definitions. The first one was based on the systems theory ST system definition. It is of formal nature and reads as follows: A process is a

system whose elements are events and activities connected by flow relations.

Events are a change in the state of the system or its environment which can initiate the

start of a process, interfere with it causing errors and pauses or end it when the desired outcome is achieved. Activities are understood as intentionally designed and implemented actions. We divide them into:

• Operations, which apply to individual activities,

• Tasks, understood as sequences of activities or operations performed by the

same ‘actor’ on the same object, and

• Decisions, which are choices, as a result of which the process can branch into

two or more paths.

Flows are relations that consist in the movement of goods (transport) and information

(communication). The process structure can be described in the form of a PS graph as following (Bukowski 2019):

𝑃𝑆 ⊂ (𝐸, 𝐴, 𝑅) (1)

where: E - process initiating, disturbing and terminating events,

A – activities (operations, tasks, decisions), R - relations between events and flow relations.

𝐸 = (𝑒_!: 𝑖 = 1, 2, 3, … , 𝑙) (2)

𝐴 = (𝑎!: 𝑗 = 1, 2, 3, … , 𝑚) (3)

𝑅 = (𝑟_!: 𝑘 = 1, 2, 3, … , 𝑛) (4)

Business practice recommends using descriptive definitions, therefore the following definition of a process is proposed: A process is a structured chain of events and

actions interconnected by flow relations, the aim of which is to achieve the desired result.

Process approach is to be understood as the identification of processes, their

dependencies and order, determination of the criteria and methods ensuring and evaluating effectiveness, regular monitoring, measurement and analysis, as well as the implementation of any corrective actions necessary to achieve planned results and their continual improvement.