Industrial Field Service Network Planning

Researchers:

P. Hertz

Financed by:

The Professorship’s own resources

Motiavation:

This thesis has its focus in service operations management for industrial field services. More specifically, if focuses on the formality of planning and decision support with regard to field service networks, which represent a special type of service delivery system. In the introduction, the fundamental concepts that are relevant for this contribution are introduced, before the challenges service managers face and the lack of methods and tools in this area are highlighted. Based on an extensive review of literature and industrial practices, the requirements are evaluated before the research questions, the applied research methodologies and research designs are introduced in detail. In the results section, a formal conceptual model is introduced that provides a guideline and best-practices to service managers for optimizing different aspects of a field service network, as for example the physical structure of its resources or its service delivery process. For each planning task detailed in- and outputs, that should be considered, are provided. The second contribution of this thesis is represented by a decision support system, which has been implemented as a technical software prototype, and enables service managers to conduct detailed and quantitative analyses of “what-if” scenarios. Exemplarily, two industrial cases reveal the applicabilitiy of the developed concepts.
The thesis closes with a summary of the reults and an outlook for future research.