Services accounted for 68% of the U.S. GDP in 2005, and 63.5% of Singapore's GDP in 2006. Much scientific research in recent years have focused on supporting and assisting product-based industries. With the services sector becoming a dominant force in the world economy, industrial and academic research facilities are questioning whether their research focus should more closely align with economic priorities.

Services Science, Manufacturing and Engineering (SSME) is an emerging academic discipline which aims to bring together ongoing work in computer science, operations research, industrial engineering, business strategy, management sciences, social and cognitive sciences, and legal sciences to develop the skills required in a services-led economy.

This talk will review some recent work in Services Research at IBM, recent activity worldwide in this area (both by universities and national governments), and consider the merits and disadvantages of recognising, exploring, and promoting this new field.

Brian is a Senior Technical Staff Member at IBM, and is currently Program Director, Globalisation, within the Integrated Supply Chain (ISC) organisation. Brian returned recently from an assignment in Singapore as Director of Strategy, IT and Business Transformation, where he established new missions, including a new Asia Pacific South Customer Solutions Centre and the IBM-NUS On-Demand Supply Chain Solutions Centre lab, a collaboration between ISC and National University of Singapore (NUS).

Brian joined the Singapore team from ISC Business Growth Initiatives, which had the mission to leverage internal supply chain capabilities to drive revenue growth for IBM. Prior to this work, Brian served on two special assignments: Global Resources strategy in Services and General Procurement, and Adaptive Workforce (ADWF), an initiative to reengineer the demand/supply processes within IBM Global Services business. His focus for that team was establishing the s charter and the target business architecture.

effort Brian Eck joined IBM and Corporate Logistics in 1997 to support transitioning constraint-based planning tools from global optimisation (in Enterprise Capability Assessment) to incorporate local execution. He then led a swat team to apply the Asset Management Tool, an inventory optimisation and simulation tool. These models identified the impact of supply chain design choices (postponement, fab/fulfillment, pull replenishment) and influenced improvements in multiple divisions.

Brian then hired and led a team to use the Supply Chain Operations Reference (SCOR) model to assess opportunities throughout various business units in IBM. The team identified over $100 million in potential savings, and their efforts resulted in actual annual cost reductions exceeding $10 million.

Prior to joining IBM, Brian was Vice President of Quality and Strategy at AAL, a Fortune-500 fraternal insurance company. In that position, he designed and led a reengineering effort, which saved hundreds of thousands of dollars annually, and tied customer loyalty metrics to the top line in a balanced scorecard approach. This built on s six years in management consulting with Juran Institute, where he worked with industries as diverse as health care, software, educational testing, financial services, manufacturing, and the Department of Defense. Earlier supply chain work included simulation models and scheduling heuristics for Xerox Corporation.

Brian Brian received his Ph.D. in Operations Research from Columbia University in 1990, after completing M.Phil. and M.S. at Columbia University in the same field. He holds a B.A. in mathematics and German from Kalamazoo College, and has served on several Boards of Directors, including a four-year stint on the Supply-Chain s SCORboard. Brian has taught supply chain management as an adjunct professor at Stern School of Business at New York University, and has taught graduate courses in quality engineering and operations research at Columbia University. Most recently, he served as adjunct associate professor at National University of Singapore.