Maintenance Supply Chain Optimisation within an IT-Platform: Network Service Science and Management

Abstract

The paper presents an approach towards a new concept for maintenance supply chain (MSC) optimisation exemplified on spare parts management and its logistic chain. Maintenance organisations operate in complex supply chains confronted with strong interdependencies (e.g. integration of service and logistics providers). Concurrently they need to perform efficiently to guarantee the required availability of their assets. In case of both reactive and proactive maintenance tasks, orders (e.g. for spare parts) are often transmitted manually to the suppliers which results in unnecessary time losses. To improve these interface problems an overall reference model will be developed to standardise and synchronise inter-company processes and organisational structures. Based on this model an open IT-platform - integrating all MSC-participants from end-customer via maintenance service provider, spare part retailer, spare part producer and logistics service provider - and their business software solutions (i.e. ERP or CMMS) - will be established. Over that a business model for operating this IT-platform will be presented. Within this concept new condition monitoring and mobile device technologies are assimilated to enable the (semi-)automatic generation of spare part orders by the CMMS, directly injected to the suppliers' ERP-system. Due to nearly real-time order processing the order-to-deliver time for spare parts can be reduced dramatically. Consequently maintenance tasks can be managed more reliable and breakdown times and rates can be reduced.