Design and development of product support and maintenance concepts for industrial systems

Product design and service delivery both affect service performance, and therefore a product support strategy must be defined during design stage, in terms of these two dimensions, to ensure the delivery of “promised product performance” to customers. Furthermore, product support strategy should not only be focused around product, or its operating characteristics, but also on assisting customers with services that enhance product use and add additional value to their business processes. This paper examines various issues such as reliability, availability, maintainability, and supportability (RAMS), etc., which directly or indirectly affect product support, maintenance needs and related costs on the basis of a case study conducted in a manufacturing company. The main purpose of the study was to analyse the critical issues related to the product support and service delivery strategy as being practised by the company, and to suggest means for improvements. On the basis of the case study, the paper presents an approach for design and development of product support and maintenance concepts for industrial systems in a multinational environment. The paper emphasizes that the strategy for product support should not be centred only on “product”, but should also take into account important issues such as the service delivery capability of the manufacturers, service suppliers, the capability of users' maintenance organization, etc.