Service Oriented Information Design

A Concept for Managing the Handover to Industrial Services (diss.)

Researcher:

Dr. Gerhard Burger

Partner:

SIG Pack Services (CH)

Financed by:

The Professorship’s own resources

Motivation:

The importance of after-sales services in the one-of-a-kind industry is rising steadily due to increas-ing customer demands, advancing internationalization, decreasing returns in the hardware business, and the growing importance of service offerings for improving company competitiveness. However, for the industry to provide professional end-user support, after-sales services depend on high-quality, very diverse information and knowledge that arise in the context of customer project execution. In today’s practice, however, after-sales services are often inadequate or can not be realized at all due to a lack or shortage of the necessary information. Although many organizations in the past undertook great efforts to build company-wide IT infrastructures and to institute organizational measures, this did not lead directly to improvements in the supply of information to after-sales services. It is this problem that was the starting point of the handover management concept developed in the project.

Objectives:

The goal of this project was to develop a concept and an information system to create a continuous and seamless flow of the information that is produced during customer project execution and is re-quired by after-sales services departments – the information that forms the fundamental basis for professional after-sales service business. As a scientific contribution, the study is a response to the existing deficit of models and methods for the design of industrial after-sales services and
approaches to optimizing information processing.

Activities completed:

Starting out from an analysis of the information processing requirements for current and potential industrial services in the one-of-kind industry, relevant design parameters for the definition of the interface between pre-sales / sales and the after-sales service areas were determined. Within this con-text a systematic approach for analyzing, structuring, and tracking relevant service information based on the logistical principle of information – the right information at the right time, in the right amount, at the right place and to the required quality – among the business processes when creating a new machine or plant was developed. Based on that, an industrial prototype to support and moni-tor and thus improve the control of the entire handover to after-sales services was developed and tested.
The results make it clear that proper implementation of handover management creates greater transparency of information processing in broad areas throughout the enterprise. They also show that improved provision of information requires a clearly defined interface, efficient handover of in-formation, and transparent and measurable information flows.
The project was completed at the end of June 2004.