Modeling service life cycles within Product Life Cycles

Abstract

The delivery of product-related services is already a necessary commodity for most goods-producing enterprises [1]. These product-related services are regarded as necessary attachment to successful production of goods. Product and service management include different methods and tools that cover the whole lifecycle [2]. Information systems such as Product-Lifecycle Management/ Product-Data-Management (PLM/PDM) systems help to support and implement these methods with the aim to raise efficiency and quality at affordable costs. However, there is a gap in modeling product-related services, with the aim to support the development and management of services. These services increasingly become a vital part for many companies, yet are often neglected. The objective of our paper is to reduce problems with product-related services focusing on the modeling of services and their lifecycles in companionship with the lifecycle of the products they support. It can help to solve problems such as fitting cost estimation, matters of quality control and communication in-house or with the customer. Therefore, modeling approaches of service engineering need to find their implementation in PLM/PDM systems, in the way, that the interrelationships between product and service (e.g. a maintenance service for a certain sold machine) can be accounted for. Our work derives from case study work realized in the field of engineering. Therefore, as result, we are able to show exemplarily how this model can be integrated in an existing PLM system [3]. © IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2013.