Moises Cases, Distinguished Engineer, System and Technology Group, IBM
Douglas Bodner, Professor, GaTech
Bhyrav Mutnury, Senior Engineer, IBM
William Rouse, Professor, GaTech

Recent attention has focused on productivity and value creation in the service sector through the advent of service science, management, and engineering. Quantitative methods increasingly are being applied to the study of service systems to improve the design, planning, and control of service delivery. Designing electronic products can be viewed as a service system in which a design team or teams provide services that lead eventually to a product specification and/or design. This paper discusses how discrete event simulation and social network analysis can be used to study and improve design processes and service delivery, and it presents a case study involving design of computer servers.