Business services are the actions/activities that help a company operate, but do not necessarily result in tangible products or outputs. They are usually provided by a single enterprise organization or network, and are typically exposed as web services. While some services are economic in nature, others are not. While there are differences between the two, they have certain characteristics in common.
Business services are a subset of economic services
Business services are a small set of transactions that businesses make that are both provided to businesses and consumers. These services can be intangible, but are very valuable to the businesses that provide them. These services often help businesses run their businesses and provide value to their customers. They can also be the source of competitive advantage.
Economic services are often described as commodities or tangible goods, but they are distinct. A business service is not a physical product; instead, it is a service that is provided on demand. This makes it difficult to measure and demonstrate its value. Furthermore, many business services are dependent on other inputs. For example, a cable television company may need to provide cable hookup and repair services. On the other hand, a financial consulting firm might only need to purchase textbooks, professional references, spreadsheets, and other materials.
They are actions/activities that help companies function properly but don’t always result in a tangible product
Providing business services requires a wide range of skills and abilities. Whether they are administrative or managerial, they must be flexible and responsive to changing customer demands. This means that businesses need to look for ways to increase their operational efficiency.
Business services are not always tangible products, but they help companies function. The goal of these activities is to improve the performance of companies by ensuring that their products are more efficient and effective. As such, businesses should make efforts to ensure that these activities become a core part of their core activities.
They are exposed as web services
Web services provide a lightweight way to expose application functionality to other systems and applications. Business Central exposes several objects as web services by default due to its integration with other Microsoft services, but developers can add their own services to the mix. For example, a customer service portal might expose a Shipping Service, Customer Management Service, and Inventory Service.
Web services are implemented using open standards. They make the concept of software as a service (SaaS) a reality. The use of web services allows applications to seamlessly integrate across different platforms.
They require supporting technical services
If you want to ensure the availability and performance of your business services, you should have an infrastructure that supports these services. Although a business service might not be considered critical, it can be impacted by a malfunction of its supporting technical services. In that case, you can configure your systems to require that incidents on the supporting technical services meet certain thresholds.
While business services are the main components of a modern enterprise, they often depend on supporting technical services in order to function. These technical services include applications, software servers, clusters, computer systems, and other components that provide services to a business.