Abstract

The presentation will be devoted to introduce the ASAP Service Management Forum, an Italian academic‐industry initiative on after sales service, and to illustrate the current research activities we have been performing at our newly constituted Research Center in Bergamo. A particular insight will be given to the research plan which Giuditta Pezzotta is carrying out on the service engineering topic within her PhD program.

Introducing the ASAP Service Management Forum The ASAP SMF is a scientific and cultural initiative (originated from the ASAP project (After Sales Advanced Planning ‐ new logistics and organizational models for the integrated management of after‐sales service) whose aim is to promote service culture and excellence on after sales service management. The ASAP SMF is a cornerstone where all professionals, practitioners and researchers could find the right playfield for discussion, dissemination, training, submission of issues or provision of solutions related to the area of service management. In 2007 the Forum could count on 47 associated companies. The main industries involved are:

• Durable consumer goods, inclusive of domestic appliances, consumer electronics;
• Automotive, inclusive of private, industrial and commercial vehicles, and motorbikes;
• Machinery, spanning from tooling machines to power plant systems;
• Digital Systems, inclusive of server and networking systems, printers and copiers, and professional imaging systems.

A framework for an integrated design of After Sales Service In the western mature economies, the evolution of cultural and sociological models, along with the continuous breakthrough of the technological edges, are driving consumers to put more emphasis on the functional properties of a product which can fulfil their sophisticated, tailored and changeable needs, than on the joy of purchasing and owning a physical product. From the offer standpoint, the widespread proposals of goods embedding the same aesthetics, functionalities and technologies, force industrial companies to shift their traditional product‐ centric business perspective to a more profitable and sustainable customer‐oriented strategy. The transition from a product centric vision, in which the product is “pushed” to the market by the company, to a customer centric vision, in which the customer “pulls”, through his expectations and needs, the main features of the Product‐Service, leads the After Sales Service function in a favoured position. In this context, the main objective of the research plan is to create a normative model which provides service managers with a set of coherent leverages for designing contents and channels of After Sales Services. The model would mainly rely on the methodologies and techniques subsumed by the Service Engineering approach, pointing out the need: (i) to involve service features since the early stages of Product‐Service design and (ii) to predict the impact which a solution can exert on the customer during his “journey” with the Product‐Service throughout his life‐cycle usage.