InCoCo-S
Innovation, Coordination and Collaboration in Service Driven Manufacturing Supply Chains (EU-NMP-CT-2005-017192)
Researchers:
I. Lange, O. Schneider, M. Vodicka, Prof. Markus Baertschi, Prof. P. Schönsleben
Partners:
Academic:
Research Institute for Rationalization and Operations Management (FIR) at Aachen University of Technology (GER)
ETH-Center for Enterprise Sciences (BWI) of ETH Zurich (CH)
Institute of Technology Management at the University of St. Gallen (ITEM HSG)
Department of Management, Economics and Industrial Engineering (DIG) Politecnico di Milano (I)
Institute for Logistics & Transport / University of Hamburg (GER)
Industrial:
BOSCH Packaging Services AG (CH)
SKF GmbH (GER)
COMAU S.p.A. (I)
IT:
SAP AG (GER)
Ventana Systems UK Limited (UK)
SME:
UNITECH- Maschinen GmbH (GER)
INM Partner (HUN)
Adige Sala S.p.A. (I)
Hörmann Industrietechnik GmbH (GER)
Exploitation:
Technology Industries of Finland (FIN)
Interessenverband Chemnitzer Maschinenbau e.V. (GER)
Standardization Body:
Organisationsoptimierung Business Process Training
Center Europe (H2O) (GER)
Financed by:
EU-NMP (Sixth Framework Program)
Contract No.:
NMP2-CT-2005-017192
Web site:
Motivation:
The European manufacturing industry relies strongly on external services and consumes nearly 30 % of the intermediate output of Business Related Services (BRS). Despite this, service providers and customers are facing tremendous problems in synchronizing their business processes and facilitating collaboration. Proven concepts and tools to solve these problems are not available. The overall goal of InCoCo-S is to enhance European leadership in manufacturing systems development.
Results:
The major outcome of InCoCo-S was the development of a business process reference model with a key focus on the operation and integration of industrial services into manufacturing supply chains. The Industrial Service Reference Model (IRM) incorporates processes, flow of information and material, best practices, and performance indicators, in order to structure the collaboration of service providers and consumers of different kinds of industrial services such as maintenance, retrofit, and packaging. Details about the IRM can be found in the CEN Workshop Agreement (CWA 15847:2008). CEN stands for Comité Européen de Normalisation/European Committee for Standardization, and the CEN Workshop is a flexible working platform open to the participation of any company or organization, inside or outside of Europe, for rapid elaboration of consensus documents.
The IRM covers all processes on three different levels, from the first service contact to continuous service operations using a service lifecycle approach. The IRM provided the required comparable processes, resulting in strong links of performance indicators to the developed reference processes. The process element chosen as an example, “Operate Packaging Services” at Level 2 in figure 1 depicts the assignment of PIs to the IRM processes. It is initiated after the "go live" decision for the packaging service and is then regularly triggered by receipt of the production schedule from the service consumer, which needs to be transformed into the packaging schedule.
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The example shows the strong link between performance indicators and standardized processes, indicating what needs to be measured while performing the process in order to compare, control, and improve its performance. Another major result of the project is the assortment of performance indicators (PIs) for the measurement of service operation performance. As shown in figure 1, the PIs are related to service activities (SA) and service objects (SO). The PIs related to service activities measure the service providers’ own internal process performance in terms of efficiency and reliability of processes. The PIs related to the service object focus on the performance of the objects (e.g. performance of packaging machine), which are being serviced by the service provider in the customer’s manufacturing supply chain.
Practical relevance:
The IRM in combination with the structured set of performance indicators serves to facilitate different goals for a service provider ranging from strategic alignment of business goals to integration of processes at the operational level. The IRM can be used for developing standardized in-house processes for both service providers and supply chain members, for benchmarking service performance, integrating IT systems based on business processes, and finally for in-house training and knowledge management. The model covers process flows describing important service clusters like maintenance, modernization (retrofit) and packaging services on an adequate level to be adapted to all service providers in the area of Business-Related Services. Industrial partners have already made use of the IRM by modeling service processes for the development of a “mobile SAP application” for service technicians. Due to the transparent description of processes, the partner won new customers and began to implement the application based on the service workflow, including all relevant inputs and resources.