Björn Schmitz

Industrial Services as a Research Discipline

Services in the industrial sector—commonly referred to as industrial services—are an important source of profit, differentiation and future growth for their providers. This sector includes industries such as heavy equipment manufacturing, energy production, chemical production and oil and gas. Despite its importance, neither the term industrial service(s) nor its concrete subareas are unambiguously defined. The goal of this paper is to motivate research which addresses the challenges currently faced in the industrial sector with regard to service. For this purpose, we review existing definitions of industrial services and identify the services in scope as well as the scientific disciplines that can contribute. The main part of the paper is a list of relevant current and future challenges which have been encountered by the authors during their daily practice.

More Observations, More Variables or More Quality? - Data Acquisition Strategies to Enhance Uncertainty Analytics for Industrial Service Contracting

Service business models expose industrial service providers to an increasing amount of uncertainties. In order to design profitable offerings, providers need to understand how uncertainties affect contract profitability. Both, access to data and algorithms are key requirements for accurate analyses.

Determining Cost-Optimal Availability for Production Equipment Using Service Level Engineering

Equipment availability is a top priority for companies with industrial production. To ensure high equipment availability, many production companies outsource equipment maintenance to external service providers. While this business has long been organized in a transaction on-call fashion, customers are more and more often demanding a shift towards longterm maintenance contracts that guarantee a certain level of equipment availability for a fixed price. However, since higher availability guarantees will usually result in higher contract prices, customers face the challenge to determine optimal levels of availability for their fleet of equipment.Applying service level engineering, this article develops a method to determine cost-optimal equipment availability for heterogeneous production equipment that is operated within the same production line. First, it is suggested to derive optimal service levels by trading-off the cost of downtime against the cost for increasing uptime. Second, using methods from graph theory, we develop an approach to quantify the downtime cost of a production line in dependence of the downtime of its individual units of production equipment.Thus, this article makes a first contribution towards the quantification of downtime cost in industrial production. It contributes to the adoption of long-term maintenance outsourcing contracts in the industrial sector.

Towards the Consideration of Performance Risks for the Design of Service Offers

This work analyzes an outsourcing provider’s challenge to design optimal service offers in a setting in which future service performance is uncertain and the provider is penalized or rewarded for deviating negatively or positively from performance guarantees. In particular, we address the question how outsourcing providers with different risk attitudes should mitigate service performance risks by incorporating uncertainty premiums into service prices. The problem is studied in the light of service incident related penalty and reward functions that tie payments to the adverse financial impact a service customer incurs from performance degradations.