Simulation and Re-engineering of Industrial Services: A Case Study from an Industrial Equipment Manufacturer

Today's industrial companies have to provide a broad range of services for the technologies and products they sell, such as engineering and maintenance services. While service management literature focuses mainly on business-to-consumer (B2C) sector describing for example hotel booking services there is great need also in industrial organizations for models and guidelines to support managers on how services should be organized. In this paper we will present the SErvice Engineering Methodology (SEEM) Framework, and how it was applied in ABB to analyze industrial services. To illustrate our approach using SEEM, we will use a case study that we have carried out for an ABB service organization in Germany. We have been able to validate this approach through additional similar case studies carried out at other ABB locations in Europe and Asia. A particular emphasis in this paper is put on discrete event based simulation tools, and how they are used in our framework in order to identify shortcomings in the services analyzed that may be subject to service re-engineering. This paper primarily seeks to contribute to the debate about models and best practices how to design, analyze, and re-engineer industrial services.