Our service dissolves on the 14th of August, 1947, and I send you this letter of retrospect and farewell. Our history as a service dates back to 1612 when on the formation of the East India Company into a jointstock business, John Woodall was appointed the first Surgeon-General of the Company. He held this office for nearly thirty years and for many years was the only Surgeon-General of the Com...

A company's economic survivability depends on the trust customers have into the company and its offered solutions. Consequently a company tries to act as a trustworthiness business partner. A difficult task, when customers cannot check the outcome and quality of an offered solution. Especially for Product Service Systems (PSS), the service part represents such an intangible performance, which c...

This paper develops a bi-level decision model and a solution approach to optimizing service features for a company to reduce its customer churn rate. First, a bi-level decision model, together with its modeling approach, are developed to describe the gaming relationship between decision makers in a company (service provider) and its customers. Then, a practical solution approach to reaching sol...

From December 2002 to June 2003 I participated in the design, development, and deployment of software for a mobile data card service provider in Tokyo, Japan (henceforth referred to as Company J). Mobile data cards can be plugged into laptop computers or PDAs to enable Internet access via cellular dial-up or, more recently, WiFi. A customer purchases both a card and a service plan from Company ...

Operations design in a network of suppliers and service providers requires a scheme by which the operations are assigned to the suppliers and service providers. This paper introduces a scheme for pattern-based operations design in an evolving multi-company network (i.e. “virtual enterprise”). It presents operations design patterns for solving four problems of managerial importance for customizi...

This work discusses the case study of a bus company that needs to evolve its ERP system to enhance the managerial strategic control over the maintenance process of the bus fleet. This maintenance process was initially characterized by a poor performance that caused the low quality of the final service to the customer. The solution to the problem, we discuss in this article, is the integration o...