Strategic product service planning for heavy industrial equipment: A reference information model.

摘要

In the heavy industrial equipment domain, being a service provider that is only a “wrench turning” is not enough to compete and grow in the global marketplace. Customers are demanding lower operating costs, higher performance, better reliability, and more availability for the equipment. New equipment service that provides increased customer productivity and value promotes enormous growth opportunities. Such service dictates new strategies that are proactive in nature, have greater demand for information and analytics, and require more complex processes and decision-making.; For the service provider, making this paradigm shift in service is a daunting and risky undertaking with numerous obstacles and challenges. Some of the major issues include setting and communicating the vision, commitment of appropriate people and financial resources, the development of information systems, and re-engineering or creating new processes. Furthermore, results found in literature have not adequately defined such requirements.; Through this research, we expanded upon the conceptual view of this service paradigm to include requirements for information, processes, and offerings. The information and process requirements are defined from the strategic, the organizational, and the operational perspectives to address the needs from top-level managers to front-line personnel and system designers. The new service offerings are customizable to align the strategic goals of the service provider with the strategic goals of the customer; thus creating a win-win situation for both.; We then developed a theoretical model to prescribe and organize the requirements for information, processes, and offerings into a framework, a reference information model. In order to facilitate the usability of such requirements and to support extensibility, we employed object-oriented modeling techniques for generating the model.; In summary, our research contributes to the knowledge of planning and designing of services in the context of the heavy industrial equipment domain that aligns the strategic goals of the service provider with the strategic goals of the customer and contributes to the knowledge of developing configurable information systems, business processes, and service agreements to meet such goals.