Enabling System-Oriented Service Delivery in Industrial Maintenance: A Meta-method for Predicting Industrial Costs of Downtime

Abstract

Nowadays, companies often outsource activities not directly related to their core business to service providers. Service providers—especially in physical services—heavily rely on complex information and optimization systems to increase their efficiency. As of now, most of those systems implement the concept of provider-oriented service delivery (POSD). Whilst POSD optimizes from a provider perspective, it neglects optimization potential on the customer side. Addressing this issue, scholars recently proposed the concept of system-oriented service delivery (SOSD). Although SOSD allows for significant cost reduction compared to POSD, it also requires additional customer cost data. In industrial maintenance, this additional cost data refers to the customer’s costs of downtime. Despite some pioneer work in this field, current knowledge does not suffice for the successful application of SOSD in the domain of industrial maintenance. Consequently, the objective of this work is to develop a method to determine a manufacturer’s costs of downtime.