AsPlanned

AsPlanned is a CTI-funded research project led by the BWI at ETH Zurich with the aim of de-veloping a holistic planning methodology and software tool for the effective and efficient design of field service networks.

Over the past few decades, manufacturers of capital goods have shown a growing interest in offering industrial (field) services (IFS) such as maintenance services for shop floor ma-chines. In order to position themselves in a highly profitable market niche and gain a competitive advantage, many Swiss companies are expanding their capabilities to provide IFS with the aim of achieving higher profitability, greater customer satisfaction and stronger customer loyalty. Nevertheless, companies are sometimes unable to cope with the complexity of the service business, specifically regarding decision-making in the setup of service resources and infrastructure as well as the definition of business processes and guidelines to perform service operations (e.g. staffing decisions, training decisions, job allocation strategy).

International studies suggest that the service business accounts for 25% of the sales and 40-50% of the profit of industrial enterprises and will become even more important in the fu-ture (Wagner, Zellweger et al. 2007). In Switzer-land, the IFS business for machinery and plants has become increasingly important, amount-ing to 699'000 employees and a share of around 20% of the Swiss gross domestic product (Haddock, Hoppe et al. 2010).

The growth of service departments, revenue contribution and the variety of service prod-ucts offered increases the complexity of the planning of IFS networks. The quality of IFS network design and planning is a key lever to achieve efficient resource utilization while maximizing customer satisfaction. However, industry still relies on rules of thumb for deci-sion making and lacks a solid quantitative ap-proach. In order to enable practitioners to pre-determine the impact of different configura-tions of the service network on different per-formance dimensions, the aim of the project is to develop a solution to support strategic deci-sion-making in IFS network design. This solu-tion is based on simulating the actual opera-tional processes in these networks (see figure 1).

At the beginning of 2013, the development of the technical prototype and the analysis of the five different industrial cases was completed. After a training session, the software was handed over to the project partners. Current activities focus on the application of the software in new industrial cases in collaboration with Zellweger Management Consulting.