Service industries have an important participation in the economies of developing countries and the advances achieved in their optimization are still incipient. This paper presents a new proposal for the life cycle of a service, having as starting point the dichotomy between a solution and the design. The results allowed to identify four macro-periods and within these, thirteen recurrent phases that permit to trace a generic service from its conception to the retirement, with the aim to open the possibility of implementing new support tools for its optimization and management. With this proposal it is possible to identify the items on which the efforts and controls should concentrate, so as to generate better services, more streamlined and of a higher value. This work is an effort to integrate the services to the global dynamics through a management model based on services.