Dynamic service contracting for on-demand asset delivery

Abstract

Traditional financial asset lease operates in an asset provider centred mode, in which financiers passively provide financial solutions to the customers of their allied asset vendors. To capture the highly customised asset lease demands from the mass market, this paper advocates adopting a financier-led asset lease model shifting the asset lease to be customer-oriented. In this model, a financier evolves to a service integrator which can create highly customised lease options by buying proper assets from and outsourcing related services to the constituent organisations of a virtual asset network. To cater for the dynamics of the virtual asset network and customer requests, an asset delivery algorithm is proposed to ensure the on-demand asset delivery. Further, a service planning mechanism is established with a scheduling algorithm to automatically detect the changes of the business environment, and actively adapt the service outsourcing plans to these changes. Thereby, the financier can easily selects the most cost efficient outsourcing actions along the asset lease lifecycle. A hypothetical example has been conducted in the vehicle leasing domain to demonstrate how the two proposed mechanisms can be integrated to effectively and efficiently manage service outsourcing for on-demand asset delivery.