Refine
Document Type
- Book (1)
- Part of a Book (1)
- Conference Proceeding (21)
- Lecture (1)
- Working Paper (3)
Language
- English (27) (remove)
Is part of the Bibliography
- no (27)
Keywords
- Additive manufacturing (1)
- Agile (1)
- Agile Development (1)
- Auction Mechanism (1)
- Business Model (1)
- Business Models (2)
- Case study research (1)
- Coordination Need (1)
- Cost Calculation (1)
- Customer Centricity (1)
Institute
- Dienstleistungsmanagement (27) (remove)
Industrial Smart Services - Types of Smart Service Business Models in the Digitalized Agriculture
(2018)
Due to lack of experience of companies with digital business models, agricultural machinery manufacturers and agricultural service companies are facing a positioning problem in their ecosystem. Smart services are getting more important for these companies and they have issues to define a matching business model for their newly developed smart services. The lack of a framework for smart service business models makes it even harder for companies to successfully develop new services.
This paper contributes to a better understanding of business models for smart services and establishes a common morphological framework to define different types of business models for smart services. Six types of business models of industrial smart services were identified during the research based, which was based on a literature review and interviews with leading experts in the field of smart services. The validation of the developed types and its practical application was carried out as part of the German research project Smart-Farming-World and its four developed use cases. This paper gives a detailed description of the application of the framework on the use case nPotato.
Smart Service Engineering
(2018)
Global manufacturing companies currently face an increasingly turbulent economic environment known as the "VUCA-world" (volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity). After the transformation of many companies from product to solution providers in the last 15-20 years, the focus of many corporate change processes is on digital solutions such as data-driven services. In this context, service development is of particular relevance for industrial services. Companies develop digital strategies and try to maximize the added value for their customers, by offering, for example, smart services. They are based on smart products, which are connected to the internet, interact with their environment and gather environmental data. The collected data sets are combined with other easily accessible information and processed into so-called smart data. Based on this smart data, smart services are designed. They can be defined as individualized combinations of physical and digital services. They generate added value for providers and customers and offer context-related and demand-oriented value via digital platforms. The contribution of this paper to this research field of data-driven services is a service engineering approach for industrial smart services.
Since the 1990s, service engineering has established itself as a systematic process for the development of services. Currently existing service engineering processes are based on engineering science and business model innovation toolsets. However, the increasing digital components in service engineering reveal deficits in the direct application of the classical methods of service engineering to smart services. We suggest that the successful development and implementation of smart services requires a more agile service engineering process. Studies show that companies who develop services successfully (top-performer) act up to six times faster than those with less success (follower). They involve customers in the first running prototype of their digital service to increase customer centricity and focus their development activities on core functionalities of the service to reduce its development time and test it early with customers.
To strengthen the successful development pf data-driven services in future industrial service development projects, this paper contributes to a more agile service engineering approach. Smart service engineering combines elements of linear phase models and implements agile and customer-centric findings to decrease the overall development time by focussing on core functionalities that offer a high value for customers. The paper focuses on the service development steps and presents strategic scenarios for smart service engineering. It presents the interaction and interconnection of different elements of smart services based on a case study research. In addition to this, it illustrates the implications of a customer-centric engineering approach and possible strategic decisions based on the customer feedback. The paper focuses on the successful application of the smart service engineering approach and its impact in a German medium-size company in the textile machine industry.
Industrial service is currently undergoing tremendous changes, largely driven by the development of new technologies, in particular the advancing digitalization. Never before have organizations had more comprehensive and insightful data assets - and never before have the opportunities to fully exploit this potential been better. However, most companies are unaware of how they can make use of this potential and which development steps are necessary to react to the current situation. To change this, a maturity-based approach was developed which describes four development stages of an industrial service company from a technological, organizational and cultural point of view. The maturity model makes it possible to develop a digital roadmap that is tailormade to each company, which helps to introduce Industrie 4.0 and transform industrial service companies into learning, agile organizations.
Industrial Smart Services: Types of Smart Service Business Models in the Digitalized Agriculture
(2019)
Due to lack of experience of companies with digital business models, agricultural machinery manufacturers and agricultural service companies are facing a positioning problem in their ecosystem. Smart services are getting more important for these companies and they have issues to define a matching business model for their newly developed smart services. The lack of a framework for smart service business models makes it even harder for companies to successfully develop new services. This paper contributes to a better understanding of business models for smart services and establishes a common morphological framework to define different types of business models for smart services. Six types of business models of industrial smart services were identified during the research based, which was based on a literature review and interviews with leading experts in the field of smart services. The validation of the developed types and its practical application was carried out as part of the German research project Smart-Farming-World and its four developed use cases. This paper gives a detailed description of the application of the framework on the use case nPotato.
The change from the traditional to the digital service provider is not easy. The digital maturity level of many industrial companies is still too low to successfully place these digital service innovations on the market. One problem of service development is the increasing involvement of information and communication technology in service development and implementation. The additional technology makes the innovation processes for services on the part of manufacturers increasingly complex by involving different internal and external stakeholders (e.g. IT partners, data protection officers or product development departments). In addition to this, data-driven services also require that manufacturers (e.g. data scientists) develop new competencies in order to use the customer data obtained to increase machine productivity and to offer new business models. Furthermore, industrial companies that want to successfully offer data-driven services must develop new market introduction strategies to create a high degree of acceptance and trust among their customers. This is necessary to get access to relevant data. These and other challenges caused the success rate of companies in regarding the development of new, industrial services to shrink.
To change this, this white paper presents six principles that help industrial enterprises to develop new successful data-driven services.
The FIR at the RWTH Aachen University continuously develops the concept and the principles of RoM further. It is already noticeable that the gap between companies that began preparing their maintenance departments for Industrie 4.0 years ago and those that are still struggling with the mere foundations of a professional maintenance organisation is rapidly increasing.
The first driver of the development sparked by Industrie 4.0 is the collection of and work with condition data. It is used to create a digital shadow of a service, e.g. maintenance measures in a specific
context. In the future, critical machine functions will be monitored continuously within production processes.
Based on these observations, the likelihood of machine failures can be predicted, which makes it possible to prioritize data-based maintenance measures. This means that maintenance activities, i.e. production plans, are based on prognoses regarding machine failures. By doing so, the currently existing separation between inspection, maintenance and reactive measures can be overcome, resulting in a holistic approach to maintenance. Maintenance specialists receive support from assistance systems, which give them access to all relevant information (e.g. machine history, spare part availability, proposals for measures, etc.). As a result, they can take on routine tasks in different areas as well and contribute to the increased flexibility of the production process. Although data is becoming an increasingly important driver of successful maintenance strategies,
maintenance employees continue to be central to specific tasks, machines and systems. In the future, it can be expected that they choose to become experts in a certain field and, ideally, actively share their knowledge with others within an open maintenance culture. Systems for interdisciplinary collaboration will be made part of everyday practice.
The maintenance department will be a center and distributor of knowledge in the agile company of the future.Only through the interaction of the outlined success principles, which amount to a paradigm shift within the maintenance department, the potential
benefit of maintenance as defined by RoM can be fully exploited, creating a long-term competitive advantage for those who consistently follow the path towards Industrie 4.0 in maintenance.
In order to cope with the challenges of an increased demand for flexibility, quality and availability of production, maintenance measures provide a major competiveness factor for manufacturing companies. Yet, interdependencies between maintenance and production activities as well as differing target systems within the functional units of an enterprise, especially production and maintenance, raise needs for extended coordination efforts. This paper aims to develop an innovative approach for the coordination between maintenance and production activities for industrial production companies. To achieve this, the novel coordination mechanism is used. It helps to achieve maximised operational availability— for a maximised output of the production system at optimal costs. Based on the developed model, the present paper identifies findings regarding the impact of different maintenance strategies on the medium-term economic efficiency of the production system.
Today, maintenance exceeds this definition, it is significantly more.
In many companies, it plays the role of an incubator for development
and drives digital transformation forward. The very essence of
Industrie 4.0 is the optimisation of the flow of information within as
well as outside of a company to accelerate the adjustment of company
organisations in the context of increasing competitive pressure.
Because of the variety of interfaces, information and data that
is available as well as its service character, maintenance lends itself easily as the area of choice for a company to make Industrie 4.0 real. Whilst doing so, the aim is not to equip employees with the
latest “gimmick“ for order processment or to be the company with
the highest number of lighthouse projects. Instead, maintenance
ensures reliable and cost-efficient production and, consequently,
the primary creation of added value of the manufacturing company.
Those who were identified as top performers during the “Smart
Maintenance“ consortium benchmarking by FIR at RWTH Aachen
University gain particular useful ideas twice as often as other follower companies directly from staff, thus releasing the right potential.
Information and data help to reach these goals and transfer the
vision of smart maintenance into actual pratice. But what is smart
maintenance exactly and how far along are you in the development
of your individual smart maintenance concept?
Increasing productivity in product-service systems is a vital success factor for industrialized economies and individual businesses. The service production is typically described as an integrated value chain setting, in which the provider and the customer are co-creators.
This paper embraces a characteristic curve model in order to illustrate the influence of the customer on the productivity of service production. The characteristic curves are derived from a system dynamics simulation model for a synchronized takt-based service production. In conclusion this research leads to designs recommendations for service production systems in order to reduce lead times and increase adherence to delivery dates.
Nowadays, providing purchasable goods is not enough for a company to survive on the global market. Because of competitive prices and a large range of products available, companies need to offer additional benefits to their customers in order to create a unique selling point. They add services to their product portfolio and offer clients the opportunity to acquire an additional service solution to go with it. The offered services need to fit to the customer's needs, resulting in a variety of available services, great complexity of the service range and decreasing transparency of the resource utilization. This paper addresses the problem by identifying variant-creating factors in product service systems, transferring them into an organizational framework and verifying their significance.
This chapter examines the question of the contribution of smart services for companies and the implications this has for the management of these business models. The chapter starts by outlining the different terminology used to describe smart services and introduces a business-driven view on the digitalization strategy of a company. The characteristic features of digital business models are explained as well as their implications for the management of smart service organizations. [https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-58182-4_4]
Process Characteristics and Process Performance Indicators for Analysis of Process Standardization
(2018)
Industrial service companies deliver technically complex services (inspection, maintenance, repair, improvement, installation) for an enormous variety of technical assets in the chemical, steel, food and pharmaceutical industry. This variety of assets leads to a corresponding variety of service processes. To ensure competitiveness, the management of industrial service companies aims to increase the service process efficiency, especially through service process standardization. However, decision-makers struggle to make knowledge-based decisions on service process standardization because ex-ante the cost-benefit ratios of process standardization are unknown. The missing understanding of cost-benefit ratios of process standardization is caused by a missing understanding, which interdependencies exist between process characteristics and process performance indicators. Thus, the objective of this paper is to determine suitable characteristics and performance indicators to measure the way service provision processes are executed in the industrial service sector. The results represent the basis for executing an empirical questionnaire study focusing on the execution of service provision processes and identifying the cause-effect relations of process standardization.
Today, machine manufacturers generate a significant share of their revenues with the provision of services. At the same time, they are confronted with the challenge of adopting of Industrie 4.0.
One of the most important Industrie 4.0 concepts is the idea of the digital shadow, which contributes to the comprehensive structuring of different kinds of data from different data sources. It can be defined as the sufficiently precise, digital representation of reality in real-time.
Thus, it also functions as a database of the considered area of a company that can be used for numerous applications. It serves as a central platform for the aggregation and distribution of data. Thereby, it helps to open isolated data silos. A system architecture that enables extraction of data from various sources and the aggregation of that data is an important prerequisite for the digital shadow.
In addition, the merger of data from different sources requires a model of the part of the company to be mapped digitally. In this paper, we focus on maintenance, repair and overhaul (MRO) services of machine manufacturers. The scope comprises the whole order processing of a service including the utilized resources and the obtained results.
MRO services and their single elements are mapped and structured using a case study research in a first step. Those elements provide a basis for designing the digital shadow. A second contribution of this paper is a data model for the digital shadow of MRO services that entails a comprehensive representation of that department.
Many industrial companies face their digital transformation. In addition to an existing portfolio of products and services, new digital services are being developed to offer a portfolio of smart product service systems (Smart PSS). While the development of new digital services is rarely a problem for the companies, the organization of sales and distribution of Smart PSS in particular is a key issue. The sales of Smart PSS differs considerably from the sales of only products or services and must therefore be designed differently in order to meet customer requirements and successfully commercialize the developed Smart PSS. This paper therefore describes how the sales organization of Smart PSS should be designed successfully in various forms. The network thinking methodology is used in combination with a case study research approach to describe the connection between the offered portfolio, the customer requirements and the different elements of a sales organization. Furthermore, four different types of a sales organization for Smart PSS are described. This paper gives a recommendation for companies on a design of their sales organizations on which practical implications may be developed.
In order to achieve a holistic cost management approach, the maintenance and service costs should already be assessed during the development of machines and equipment. The required information in the company, like PLM, process and test data, are commonly not available or vague, especially in early development phases. This paper introduces a feasible method for an early assessment of maintenance and service costs during product development. In doing so, appropriate cost assessment methods are selected, based on the availability and quality of the existing information in the individual development phases. The evaluations of these methods are aggregated in a software tool, so that the respective cost information is displayed with a maximum, minimum and most probable value. The developed software tool was validated in cooperation with a new electric vehicle manufacturer.
This paper presents a simulation approach for service production processes on the basis of which an optimal operating point for service systems can be identified. The approach specifically takes into account the characteristics of human behavior. The simulation is based on a system theory approach to the service delivery process. A specific use case of the simulation approach is presented in detail to illustrate how characteristic curves are deduced and an optimal operating point is obtained.
Traditional manufacturing companies increasingly launch data-driven services (DDS) to enhance their digital service portfolio. Nonetheless, data-driven services fail more often than traditional industrial services or products within the first year on the market. In terms of market launch, their digital characteristics differ from traditional industrial services and thus need specific structures and actions, which companies currently lack. Therefore, a process guideline for a six-month market launch phase of DDS is developed. The guideline relies on analogies from product, service and software launches based on the latest literature from service marketing and successful practices from various industries. Finally, the guideline is evaluated within five industrial case studies. Thus, the guideline provides scientific research insights regarding the market launch process of DDS and adds to the research of service marketing. It provides practical guidance for manufacturing companies by serving as a reference process for the market launch and offering a collection of successful practices within this area.