Expanding the Knowledge Economy: Issues, Applications, Case Studies Paul Cunningham and Miriam Cunningham (Eds) IOS

Press, 2007 Amsterdam ISBN 978-1-58603-801-4

Perspectives on the e-Maintenance Transition

Jan GOOSSENAERTS1, Robbert VAN LEIJSEN2, Arjan GELDERBLOM3 1 Information Systems, Dept. of Technology Management, Eindhoven University of Technology, PO Box 513, Paviljoen D12, NL-5600 MB Eindhoven, Netherlands Tel: +31 40 247 2062, Fax: +31 40 243 2612, Email: j.b.m.goossenaerts@.tue.nl 2 Assemblon Netherlands B.V., De Run 1110, NL-5503 LA Veldhoven, the Netherlands, Tel. +31 (0) 40 27 97542, Fax. +31 (0) 40 27 23826, Email: Robbert.van.Leijsen@philips.com 3 Oc Technologies B.V., Netherlands Tel +31 77 359 4857, Email: arjan.gelderblom@oce.com
Abstract: Web and wireless enabled information systems are becoming the backbone of the knowledge society. For complex electromechanical and softwareintensive equipment, the transition to e-maintenance involves original equipment manufacturers, the owners and operators of industrial facilities, and their service providers. Narrowly scoped technological and intra-organisational approaches fail to overcome the slow deployment of ICT in maintenance and repair processes. Relying on experience and a closer analysis of this problem in the context of an industry-led e-maintenance project, this paper describes an acceleration approach based on model-reuse within e-maintenance system decision and development methods. It is an option to elaborate this approach as part of an institutional initiative.

1.

Introduction

Manufacturing foresight studies [1] agree that Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEM) must widen their business focus: from designing and selling physical products to supplying a system of products and services, capable of fulfilling users' demands all over the world. For most of these OEM the service business is related to the maintenance of the equipment. The European Federation of National Maintenance Societies defines maintenance as: the combination of all technical, administrative, and managerial actions during the lifecycle of an item intended to retain or restore it to a state in which it can perform its required function. Effective maintenance and repair is critical to many operations, since it extends equipment lifetime and improves equipment availability. Traditional service delivery methods for complex electromechanical and softwareintensive machines are becoming difficult and expensive for OEM and their customers. Today, the Internet enables e-maintenance as a tool to provide equipment supplier's experts with the ability to remotely link to factory's equipment. This allows for remote setup, control, configuration, diagnosis, repair and improvement of the equipment [2]. Reflecting a broader perspective on maintenance and repair services, [3] states: E-maintenance provides companies with predictive intelligence tools, to monitor their assets (equipment, products, process etc.) through Internet or wireless communication systems to prevent them from unexpected breakdown. From a broader and more workflow specific point of view, emaintenance can be interpreted as a maintenance management process covered by state of the art information and communication technology. In spite of a firm expectation that e-maintenance can decrease service costs and cost of ownership, and enable new OEM business and new software engineering business [4], OEM are struggling with articulating and implementing their e-maintenance service proposition: Many companies have tried to develop Industrial Services to create new business with customers but many of them have failed. In many cases, customers have not
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valued the proposed service models because of the lack of added value to current cooperation between supplier and customer [5]. On the technology side, the ITEA PROTEUS project has made contributions in the area of architecture and basic concepts of an integration platform for creating distributed maintenance systems [6]. A significant number of industry-led initiatives are working at open specifications as pillars of an improved business environment. As part of the International SEMATECH Manufacturing Initiative (ISMI), the e-Diagnostics guidebook provides guidelines and requirements for implementing an e-Diagnostics system within a semiconductor factory [7]. For the MRO (Maintenance, Repair and Operations) market participants, Machinery Information Management Open Systems Alliance (MIMOSA) is developing and promoting open protocol standards to overcome the problems of equipment information scattered among separate information systems. Within ISO several initiatives give results relevant for achieving enterprise interoperability during the equipment in-use lifecycle phase. Much knowledge is available from the scientific world [8, 9]. Yet, this knowledge is ill packaged for low-hurdle application in the design and implementation of e-maintenance solutions. Given these challenges and advances, the TOAST project objective was to pilot demonstrate the value proposition and feasibility of e-maintenance and remote services. The project ran from September 1st, 2005 to October 31st, 2006 and was funded by the Brabantse Ontwikkelingsmaatschappij, a regional funding organisation. The partners were Philips TASS, Oc, Assemblon, Sioux, and TU/e. For the industrial participants, the main objective of the project was to demonstrate that remote monitoring of equipment could contribute to availability gains for the customer and to service cost reductions for the OEM. An additional objective was to gain experience with customer perceptions, acceptation by the service engineers in the field and technical aspects such as reliability, availability and security of the Internet connections. Overall TOAST achieved its industrial objectives. Availability gains and cost reductions that were achieved in particular situations have contributed to a higher priority for remote services. The feasibility of such services in the regular business, and a staircase model for e-services have contributed to a broader support with decision makers. The staircase model instantiates the ISMI framework for application of e-maintenance technology in failure-based and condition-based maintenance [7]. Yet, field service processes are often outside the reach of systematic measurements of their operational performance or outcomes. There is a lack of information, and getting reliable information on a broad range of indicators often is expensive. Moreover ICT offers an increasing range of options to improve the service portfolio. This implies a complex response, ranging from enacting a change management program, over definition of service products, to making better use of information resources. In a market characterized by immature standards and lack of near-peer success stories, the OEM risks burning assets. Moreover, standards, reference architectures, KPI trees etc., are imitable (strategic) artefacts, in which the OEM must not invest (much) more than competitors. An interactive planning approach involving suppliers, customers and partners, the following of influential adopters, and the conducting of technological experiments [10] would be an option, yet the services' closeness to the equipment makes it risky to engage in intensive exchanges with customers, service providers and competitors. Concerns of leaking knowledge and (intellectual) property, confidentiality and free-riding, and the weak enforceability of the related institutional principles, all contribute to a broad prisoner's dilemma. These circumstances and the inter-organisational nature of the e-maintenance solutions have underscored the need for refined and efficient e-maintenance system decision, development and implementation methods. This paper proposes methods and supporting models aimed at overcoming the broad prisoner's dilemma in the e-maintenance transition. The validity of these methods and models has been ascertained by basing them on the
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legacy regarding methodology and information systems development and implementation, and by evaluating their joint use at the mental level of positivistic reasoning [11]. As yet, they have not been tested in industrial service systems.

2.

Concerted Regulative Cycles for Accelerated e-Transitions

Where research should lead to problem-solving or practical interventions, there is often a need for the process of multi-methodology, that is, combining together several methods in an intervention [12]. Originating in psychological practice, the regulative cycle [13] has been extensively applied also as a methodology of practice, geared towards the "interested" regulation of the behaviour of groups or organizations in the desired direction. Where principals are engaged with the operations and improvement of a work system such as a plant, a hospital or a service system, the cycle includes the following activities: evaluation (of system operations with respect to an instrument or via benchmarking), problem identification (selection from a problem mess), diagnosis (of the problem situation analysis), plan of action (design), and intervention (implementation). This last step is followed by evaluation to close the cycle. In the evaluation activity it is convenient to have an instrument to compare the performance or structure of the work system. The reference fab methodology [14] uses a reference model for systematic target setting on high level performance indicators. The model obtained from peer intelligence is translated into a site specific reference model with targets for the actual site work system. The translation considers factor costs, volumes and complexity of technologies.
Peer Intelligence (Market, Science, Roadmap , Benchmarking ,..) Problem /Gap Register

reference model
Evaluation / Monitoring Translation

Problem Identification

real site work system

s site specific reference model Intervention Implementation

Analysis and diagnosis

Plan of action Design

Figure 1: Regulative Cycle Extended with Reference Models

As e-maintenance implementation problems involve the ICT-reliant work systems of multiple enterprises including the OEM and its customers, some form of concertation of their regulative cycles is recommended. Where benefits of model-based development [15] are pursued, sharing model repositories can help reduce common project risks [16]. Where a trend to many-to-many relationships is observed [17], lock-in strategies by software vendors, and free-rider attitudes and prisoner's dilemma by OEM and their customers may delay achieving solution flexibility, perpetual service-IT alignment, as well as affordable development and implementation costs. A complicating factor in deciding on investments in the maintenance value chain is the imitable nature of the standards, architectures, contracts and services that must be deployed. In economic theory, the relevant game is the public good game, a multi-player variant of the prisoner's dilemma [18].
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The maintenance community is a highly fragmented community, for which the savings that improved interoperability could deliver have been quantified [19]. This community is also conservative as facilities and equipment are sturdy, capital intensive, long-lived and often the object of intricate regulatory or contractual requirements. Reflecting the insights of Nobel laureate D.C. North [20] regarding institutions' impacts on economic performance, institutional initiatives could be contemplated for removing roadblocks in the emaintenance transition. Inspired by [21], Figure 2 depicts in an abstract manner the facilitating role of institutions and infrastructure. Where such facilitation remains absent, market interactions will suffer. Institutions may have market enlarging effects [22]. The next section focuses on the reusable models and concerted regulative cycles that are proposed as elements to bridge the utility gap delaying the outcomes of market interactions in the e-maintenance area.
technology based demand-supply interactions without fit institutions & utilities for data & knowledge
demand for data & software applications in the maintenance work-system

demand-supply interactions under right-conditioned institutions facilitated by utilities designed for efficient material/energy/financial flow & people mobility

improvement misses due to silo-architecture non-interoperabilities as cross-cutting innovation decelerator; asset eroder; incentive destroyer

strategy to lock in customers by vertical solutions

institutions infrastructure (+ model-ware commons)

institution gap utility gap

supply of data and software applications for the maintenance work system

Figure 2: Managing e-Transitions in the Maintenance Eco-system

3.

Model-based Development of Maintenance Services

Regulative cycles for a work-system are well understood and much practised; the challenge in the e-maintenance transition is the concerted deployment of Information and Communication Technology in work-systems controlled by different principals. The next sections illustrate an approach to reuse models, in particular goal models and operations models. These models are computation independent and reflect business concerns. Typically they would find a place in one of the dimensions of enterprise architecture. Within the decision and/or information system of the industrial OEM and its customers, these models are refined, instantiated and mapped. Process and information models can be embodied in platform specific solutions. 3.1 A Generic Goal Model

The real site work-system of maintenance processes is cross-enterprise. Figure 3 depicts a generic goal model for maintenance collaborations. Clauses in service level agreements between the OEM and its customer will determine scores for activities that are initiated by events in the equipment life cycle. In the instantiation of the generic model for the customer, the equipment is in the role of the asset, and improved asset availability will
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determine what the customer is willing to pay for the (speed of the) service. When a service provider is called in, his EVA depends upon low service cost and high customer satisfaction. Manufacturers of "products built to last" find that revenues from after-sales product installation, configuration, maintenance and repairs are 30% or more of their total revenues, and that the proportion is increasing [23]. Yet, as the quality of equipment improves, the service sales may be decreasing as well. In markets where services including maintenance are becoming increasingly important as a product differentiator, the OEM partners in TOAST agree both on the radicalism of the service challenge and the complex value equation. On the one hand new e-services, like predictive maintenance or advanced process monitoring are quite different from the OEM core-business. On the other hand, customers do not like spending money on services, unless there is a proven significant revenue increase. Moreover, equipment-focussed services must not only help to increase machine availability and productivity. In complex environments such as manufacturing plants, offices or hospitals, customers also expect that durable OEM products and services will leverage the customer's investments in ICT technology, service and business processes. Given the absence of near-peer success stories in services and the lack of data-exchange and enterprise interoperability standards, these expectations fuel expensive development and repeated customization demands for low-frequency interactions.
Improve Economic Value Added

Improve Quality /cost relation of provided service

Improve Asset Productivity

Lower Service Cost

Increase Customer Satisfaction

Increase Service and Product Quality

Improve Speed of Service

Increase reliability performance

Improve maintainability performance

Improve supportability performance

Figure 3: Generic Goal Model

3.2

The Design Space of Maintenance Activities

With given demand characteristics and goals, and performances measured, the work-system stakeholders can evaluate decision alternatives for improving the maintenance activities performance and outcomes. Decision making in the maintenance environment is constrained in a design space of which Figure 4 shows the most relevant design parameters and variables. The e-maintenance decision variables are within the structural decision element maintenance technology [9]. By way of example, the performance and outcome indicators are structured in accordance with the perspectives of the balanced scorecard [24]. Given the real site work-systems of an OEM (providing maintenance services) and of its customers, the reuse of the design space reference model (Figure 4) occurs via multiple instantiations of the central box for the (real-site) resources, and via their mutual connections by means of pattern connectors that instantiate to places of the flattened Petri net representations of the systems under study.

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system parameters
Maintenance strategy Maintenance policies & concepts Structural decision elements - maintenance capacity - maintenance facilities - maintenance technology - vertical integration Infrastructural decision elements - maintenance organisation - performance measurement & reward system - maintenance policy & concepts - maintenance planning & control systems - human resources - maintenance modifications

exogenous variables
- equipment failures - segment /site properties - regulations - constraints

maintenance activities
endogenous variables
Variables under consideration to improve the system outcome or performance

outcome and performance indicators

Financial : repair cost , lost production Customer /Supplier: mean time to repair , delivery reliability , customer satisfaction Internal Processes /Resources : variance , speed, quality Growth /Learning : channel preferences , diagnostic accuracy

Figure 4: Design Parameters and Variables in the Design Space of Maintenance Activities

3.3

Piece-wise Construction of the Maintenance Operations

Maintenance service processes involve multiple roles and feature a broad range of information requirements. Principal, asset and resource models have been expressed as UML class diagrams, using the conventional domain modelling techniques. Petri net based process modelling techniques [25] are used to express the fault behaviour of and conditionrestoring services for equipment. Figure 5 shows the activity building blocks using a variant of activity patterns [26]. With these building blocks models are configured for two kinds of uses: (i) the evaluation of decision alternatives using techniques such as simulation [27]; (ii) the development of business process models that can be mapped to distributed service information systems spanning both the customer facilities and the OEM service system. In the latter mappings, following the COMET methodology, we have adhered to a reference model for technical integration [28].
Machine owner
Plant

Produce

Service

S1

S2

S3

EQ1

EQ2

EQ1

EQ2
Plant

Plant
Eq1

S1
i
Produce

S2
o

Service

Eq2
Service

Produce

o S3
Critical level alert by monitor

S2
Produce

Equipment event

Impact of breakdown

Scheduled maintenance alert

Service

Asset-connector

Asset-connector

Asset-connector

Asset-connector

Asset-connector

Asset-connector

Service Provider
Service request
Service (callcenter )

Service (at MOW)

Asset-connector

Asset-connector

Asset-connector

Figure 5: Building Blocks for Maintenance Processes

4.

From Resource Enablement to Social Benefits

Many e-maintenance benefits are delayed or missed because the effective and efficient walking through of the regulative cycle for the maintenance work-system is hampered. The
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proposition of this paper is that well-tested and reviewed models in common repositories can embody scientific knowledge on a sector of industry. OEMs, their customers and suppliers, regulators, standards organizations, and researchers, all can express particular views on maintenance work systems with respect to these reference models. For the OEM and its customers, configured models will typically reflect the core competences, as well as typical factors and objectives, and the agreements in the service contracts. The imitable property of the repository contents and CRC's will contribute to resource enablement [29] at a large scale across society. As enhanced institutions and utilities can mitigate the prisoner's dilemma, continuous tactical and operational improvements can be achieved at minimal cost, maximally focussed on value. Social benefits will inherently result from the broad accelerated match of knowledge to situations where it creates value.

5.

Conclusions and Future Work

Conventional decision and development approaches perform poorly in delivering the large numbers of small e-benefits that must be obtained in maintenance processes. Moreover they do not discern the common and proprietary knowledge in the development. Multimethodology structured by a regulative cycle can overcome this gap but in a modeldriven era that lacks suitable institutions and utilities it has a high cost. By concerting regulative cycles, and reusing models in work system repositories, e-maintenance investments can be significantly reduced, and services can be meticulously specified in an incremental manner. Moreover, suitable institutions and utilities could help removing the prevailing prisoner's dilemma in the sector. In the TOAST project multiple participants in the maintenance value chain have performed an experimental concerted walk through of their regulative cycle for the maintenance work system, and they have articulated common model fragments. The lessons learned in small scale projects have contributed to a more crisp understanding of the emaintenance transition challenge and the role for acceleration of institutions, standards, reference architectures, repository and tool support. Related issues are addressed in ongoing research and technology development. The importance of institutional determinants of adoption and diffusion for e-maintenance should be investigated in more detail, for instance along the lines of [22, 29, 30]. Further demonstration and diffusion must be achieved in public-private partnerships.

Acknowledgements
The authors are grateful to all TOAST participants, in particular Jan van Dalfsen, Ernst Hermens, Arnoud de Geus, GertJan Schouten and Rob Kersemakers. Without the financial support of the Brabantse Ontwikkelingsmaatschappij the project would not have been possible. The constructive comments by the anonymous eChallenges e-2007 reviewers were a great help in improving the presentation of our work.

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