State of the art: business service and its impacts on manufacturing

The world is coming into the time what is known as the Service Era. Various business services are gradually being separated from manufacturing industries. In this paper, Business service concepts, features and classifications are firstly introduced, and the evolution trends of business service are also briefly summarized. The state-of-the-art of research and development work on business service is overviewed, in three different domains, i.e., the service economy, service systems and service-oriented computing. In particular, main research topics in a new discipline named Service Science, Management and Engineering are mentioned. Business service impacts on manufacturing and new challenges in business transformation from manufacturing to service are discussed. Finally, three case studies on business services are given.