Service/Product Engineering: a new discipline for value production

Manufacturers are required to supply more services in addition to just material products to customers recently. A new methodology is necessary to create value by combining services and products in this context. To serve this need, we propose a new engineering discipline called Service/Product Engineering (SPE). SPE differs from traditional, primitive engineering and concurrent engineering in that the design target is customer value rather than a physical product. Both products and service activities are means of value creation, so in SPE, products and service activities are designed in parallel according to the value to be designed. After the design is complete, production planning, production and service activities are completed. The roles of product design and product production change under SPE: from product production to value production. To accomplish this, we describe our model of service, a computer-aided design system and an applied example. Both our modeling method and the CAD tool are verified through an example presented herein.