Business services are activities that assist a company yet do not deliver a tangible commodity. Examples of business services are IT, human resources, marketing, consulting, and logistics. Companies outsource these services to free up time and money for other aspects of their operations. These services also allow them to reach more customers and provide more complete products. Some business services are offered by government agencies.
Unlike goods, which can be stocked in inventory for future use, services are delivered only when they are demanded. This is one of the main differences between goods and services. The other difference is that service businesses require customer involvement.
Some common business services are IT support, training, and consulting. Other business services include logistics, waste management, and real estate services. Some specialized services are also available, such as a solar panel installer that charges commercial clients based on power consumption.
A business service is an object that encapsulates and simplifies the use of functionality, allowing developers to concentrate on the data that it acts upon. It has methods that can be called either programmatically or, in the case of Siebel EAI, declaratively through workflows. A business service has properties and maintains a state, which is defined in a property set.
A property set is a logical memory structure used to hold serialized data. For general business services, the property set is based on the class CSSService; for data transformation business services, it uses the CSSEAIDTEScriptService class. You can create general business services at design time in Siebel Tools and, for run-time applications, you can create them in the Business Service Administration screens.
