Business Case 2
Business Case 2 is realised with the company OAS AG. Key business activities are industrial plant construction and engineering with focus on process engineering in combination with weighing, measurement and control technology as well as computer applications for continuous and discontinuous processes.
Moreover, OAS provides sophisticated routine maintenance services to their customers (e.g. embedded diagnostics, remote diagnostics support and preventive maintenance etc.).
The key improvement domain is to go beyond the state-of-the-art in industry within the next 2-5 years, addressing a new maintenance service quality in case of unexpected problems of installations at customer sites. From Quality, Costs and Schedule point of view, the OAS' key objectives can be summarised as follows:
- Decreasing reaction time in case of unexpected problems, failures and breakdowns at customer premises.
- Decreasing fault recovery times.
- Reduction of maintenance efforts and costs.
- Increasing maintenance productivity.
- Increase of maintenance quality.
OAS will require a new dimension of interaction and collaboration within OAS as well as with their customers by structuring the corporate knowledge, providing optimal electronic access to information, and supporting documentation. Moreover, to achieve a sustainable improvement, within the maintenance processes an interaction with existing information systems represents an essential improvement dimension.
From human centric point of view the strategic improvement addresses the objective to optimally support the human operators in the different business processes in a way that they can focus on decision processes and are disburdened from basic information processing activities. Furthermore, the mobile information access represents a key issue.
To improve the maintenance services of OAS in case of unexpected problems at customer site, explicit measures have to be taken to overcome the identified weak points in the maintenance order management and in the maintenance operation management domain. This will reduce the reaction time to customer problems, improve the identification of problems and measures. From human centric point of view the optimisation of the HO involvement in the execution of the required activities shall address the following general aspects:
- Focus of the task allocation of the human operator on decision processes.
- Provision of all decision relevant information to the HO to
- make available context dependent distributed information and
- avoid repetitive tasks, like searching for relevant information, elementary information I/O.
The envisaged AmI system with its different AmI features shall enable the elimination of identified weak points and specifically support the concerned human operators in execution of their tasks.