Assessing sustainable services

The design, production and delivery of sustainable services as well as the ability to assess and compare different services to identify those that are the most sustainable, requires that the interactions between sustainability and service be somehow ‘engineered’. This goal can be achieved by instituting a sustainability assessment for services based on a set of unified and comparative measures to qualify and quantify the sustainability of services with respect to their core- and super-values and in terms of the service co-creation process. In this chapter, we suggest a methodology, with indicators and indexes, to measure the integration of sustainability in the design of the service supply chain and to assess the sustainability of service. Taken together, the use of such indicators promotes more efficient decision-making regarding service sustainability. In addition, they enable services and processes to be compared from the perspective of their supply-chains, a process that subsequently helps identify the most un-sustainable links in those chains as well as the links that have the greatest impact on the sustainability of the entire service system. Finally, they also allow for the incorporation of complementary and supportive services to increase the sustainability of the service system as a whole.