A module-based service model for mass customization: Service family design

Service science research seeks to improve the productivity and quality of service offerings by creating new innovations, facilitating business management, and applying practical applications. Recent trends seek to apply and extend principles from product family design and mass customization into new service development. Product family design is a cost-effective way to achieve mass customization by allowing highly differentiated products to be developed from a common platform while targeting individual products to distinct market segments. This article extends concepts from module-based product families to create a method for service design. The objective in this research is to develop a method for designing customized families of services using game theory to model situations involving dynamic market environments. A module-based service model is proposed to facilitate customized service design and represent the relationships between functions and processes in a service. A module selection problem for platform design is considered as a strategic module-sharing problem under a collaboration situation. A coalitional game is used to model potential module sharing and determine which modules used in the platform provide the most benefit. A case study involving a family of banking services is used to demonstrate implementation of the proposed method.