Towards a comprehensive service business management environment for equipment manufacturers

Transformation of equipment manufacturers to become providers of industrial services is a trend that involves deep transformation of companies. Equipment manufactures can potentially provide services significantly more efficiently and effectively by utilizing information about their installed base. We aim to recognise decision support functionality and required information contents for a system that supports service business in context of services like “full service”, lease of maintained equipment, extended warranties, and operations and maintenance. A further supported function is product and service development. 8 cases from Finnish machine building and telecommunications industries provide a basis for our view of business needs in decision support of operational and tactical levels of service business management. We present a vision of a decision making tool for service business of equipment manufacturers – the Service Business Management Environment (SBME) and identify decision making situations (“use cases”) of SBME. SBME integrates ideas and information content from Engineering Asset Management, Condition Based Maintenance, standards to represent and exchange life-cycle, reliability and maintenance data, and e-maintenance. If successful, SBME can support transformation of equipment manufacturers to service business. This takes place by aggregating information from whole installed base, which enables better accuracy in health assessment, prognostics, cost estimation, awareness of service contract status in terms of defined KPIs, and analysis of profitability of service offerings. Furthermore, SBME supports product development by providing information on field reliability, maintainability, recognition of epidemics and other inputs.