Sustainability by Design: How Service Lifecycle Management and Digital Thread Drive Efficiency

At this year’s 21st service management forum, ASAP will feature “the servitisation revolution for sustainability.” While both keywords attract attention, the road to action is less obvious. I find it positive to see a growing consensus on the ‘why’ and ‘what’ of sustainability. However, I detect a more hesitant dynamic when addressing the ‘how’ and ‘who.’ Hence, I will deliver a keynote, “Sustainability by Design,” on October 25th, sharing practical approaches to help you deliver on your sustainability ambition.

Sustainable product design

For just over 30 years, I have worked in the service domain. When I ask service leaders and technicians about the serviceability of products, it feels like poking a bear. “What did engineering have in mind when they designed this product? It is difficult to both diagnose and repair.”

By nature, service technicians are a mix of firefighter and magician: they will get the work done, one way or another. Whether that work is done efficiently, cost-effectively, or profitably is a different story. But is it sustainable? Definitely! Repairing a product is more sustainable than buying a new one.

For years, iFixit.com has been giving repairability scores to B2C products. Its purpose is to change the consumer mindset regarding sustainability. Today, sustainability awareness is embedded in right-to-repair legislation (both in the EU and the U.S.). See the iFixit Repair Manifesto here.

Shifting to the B2B world of your technicians, they could write a book on the challenges of repairability:

  • Why do I need two hours of labor to disassemble a product to replace a $5 component?
  • Why do I need special tools just to open the product?
  • Why does the repair kit contain parts I never use and/or cannot reuse?

These challenges are embedded in the product’s design, which brings us to the topic of design-for-service, or perhaps we should say design-for-operation. Meaning: how easy and sustainable is it to use products?

Now, we arrive at a branch:

  • How do we make existing products more sustainable?
  • How do we make new products more sustainable?

For the latter, we could start from scratch and act upon the guidelines for sustainable product design. For the former, we must accept historical/sub-optimal design decisions and establish mitigating strategies in the domain of service lifecycle management (SLM).

Service lifecycle management (SLM)

When I visit OEMs (Original Equipment Manufacturers) as a service persona, my favorite opening phrase is, “You design and build great products, and then they go into the field.” This “going into the field” will happen regardless of whether design-for-serviceability and sustainability concepts are applied during the engineering process. What I’m saying is that SLM can and should apply its own design-for-sustainability paradigm when defining processes and tooling. By doing so, the service function will achieve two goals:

  • The current installed base will be serviced as sustainably as possible, within product design constraints.
  • Data collected from the existing installed base will feed sustainability improvements for the next generation of products.

An example of a simple, efficient, and powerful way to drive sustainability is by using the mean-time-between-failure (MTBF) metric in a plan-versus-actual approach.

Suppose Engineering designs a component with an expected MTBF of 10,000 hours. This is the plan. We then produce a batch of 100 units, which go into the field. Each of those units will have a unique service lifecycle, generating live data. This is the actual. When a unit fails, Service typically repairs the component reactively. But when you start using the MTBF to predict and identify outliers, you become more sustainable:

  • Planned interventions are both cheaper and more sustainable than unplanned work.
  • Comparing actual vs. planned MTBF will help identify unplanned downtime and sustainability issues early on.
  • Capturing actual MTBF is a critical data point for sustainable product design.

If the actual MTBF deviates from the planned value, it doesn’t always mean Engineering was wrong. Sustainability also involves a customer component. Acting on the discrepancy may lead the OEM to advise the customer on better usage and product management.

By design

In the previous two paragraphs, I’ve addressed two facets of Sustainability by Design: a product-design facet and a process-design facet. Combining the two will boost your sustainability benefits, making 1 + 1 = 3.

Two additional concepts come into play. You could see them as building blocks of your sustainability agenda:

  • Digital thread: The flow of product information through all stages of its lifecycle. In other words, a thread from as-designed, as-built, as-sold, as-installed, as-maintained, and as-decommissioned.
  • Product Passport: The system-of-record for products in the field, capturing the data from all touchpoints over its service lifecycle.
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Where the digital thread anchors product lifecycle information from engineering to service and vice versa, the Product Passport captures the service lifecycle information of each product instance in the field. Together, they create an actionable closed loop regarding a product’s health and performance. These insights help the product owner, OEM, and service organization make informed decisions about three important lifecycle choices affecting sustainability:

  1. When to maintain a product.
  2. When to upgrade a product.
  3. When to replace a product and recover the residual value of the old one.

Whether sustainability is your primary or secondary driver, the technology to realize your ambition exists today. Digital Thread and Product Passport address the ‘how’ and ‘who.’ If you want to learn more, visit us at ASAP Service Management in Brescia, Italy, on October 24th and 25th, or contact us.

Published on PTC Blog.

Digital Thread: How the Service Bill of Materials Links Engineering to Service

When we embark on a digital transformation journey in the after-sales domain, where does the process start? With the sale of the product? Commissioning of the product? First service call? We believe the foundation for the design of your service delivery processes starts in engineering.

This blog is part 1 in a series of three.

The creation of the service manual

When Engineering designs a product, they have an intended use profile in mind. That use profile defines wear-and-tear. Subsequently, the maintenance engineering function will define mitigating strategies to maintain the output specifications of the product and to sustain/prolong its lifecycle. The results are typically captured in the service manual and the Service Bill of Materials (BoM).

The golden standard of service

In a recent engagement with a prospect of ours, we asked to see the service manual of a medium-complex product to scope the service delivery business processes. Our premise: we may upsell on the service manual and promise higher value, but when we deliver less, product continuity and lifecycle may be at risk. As such, the service manual can be seen as the golden standard of service delivery.

In the 165 page pdf-document, we found a wealth of information on what to do, when to do it, and how to do it. Bill-of-materials, serviceable parts, PM-frequencies and kits, recommended consumables and spare parts, installation parameters, calibration values, and MTBF rates. We got enthusiastic. If somebody in engineering created this document, how does it ‘flow’ to after-sales? What system of record does after-sales use to be able to act upon the information in the service manual?

Digital thread

In the last decade, we’ve seen a lot of digitization initiatives driving the transformation agenda. We’ve also seen that a lot of digital data is still created and collected in silos. Engineering is digitizing product lifecycle management (PLM), manufacturing is pursuing Computer-aided manufacturing (CAD), sales are rolling out customer relationship management (CRM) and service is reshaping field service management (FSM). But how do they link to one another? Isn’t the overarching value promise of digitization the sharing of data leading to 1+1=3?

If your organization is in the business of designing, manufacturing, selling, and servicing products, then all those functions are connected through a digital thread. The carrier of the thread is the product itself. Starting as an as-engineered and subsequently transitioning into an as-built, as-sold, and as-maintained. In each stage of the lifecycle, additional information is added to the thread. Zooming out, each function will look at the digital thread through a lens to increase the value proposition.

Design for service

In our engagement with the above-mentioned prospect, we were curious how much design-for-service thought was put into the engineering phase and how that information would shape the design of the service delivery processes. Though the wealth in 165 pages of the service manual was phenomenal, the service organization had not yet invested in processes to receive the engineering baton.

The opening paragraph of the service manual provided a great narrative to introduce the baton. “Congratulations on your purchase. To protect your investment and get maximum return, we’ve defined some handles for good husbandry. This manual contains the instructions to guarantee the nominal output over its technical lifecycle”. In other words, the service manual defines the golden standard of maintenance to underpin the value promise of the product sale[1].

What Engineering documented in the 165-page service manual can be condensed in the following picture. In the first column, we find the Service-BoM. The Service-BoM is a subset of the Engineering/Manufacturing BoM. It contains only those parts that are serviceable. The manual pre-empts what skills are required to perform that serviceable activity. Can it be done by the customer, does it require a skilled technician or should the part be swapped in the field to be repaired in a depot/repair center?

With the above information from maintenance engineering, service delivery has a great blueprint defining what output its business processes should deliver. Analogously, service sales has an anchor to model cross and upsell offerings for customers having needs beyond the baseline described in the service manual.

Design for improvement

The service manual also serves another very important purpose; improvement. Improvement in two directions. Engineering giving handles to service and service giving feedback to engineering. As an illustration, I’ll use the mean time between failures (MTBF) column in the above table.

When Engineering designs a product, they typically have an idea of the lifecycle/MTBF of used components. Those values initially are theoretical numbers. Call them Plan. When the product hits the field in larger numbers, empirical values will trickle in. Call them Actual. When Actual is within a narrow margin of Plan, we say this is expected behavior. When it falls outside the margin, we call it an outlier. Understanding the root cause of the delta between Plan and Actual will enable you to drive improvement by process design.

  • Maybe the product was not installed properly
  • Maybe the product was not used as intended
  • Maybe engineering was wrong
  • Maybe service delivery was not in line with the service manual
  • Maybe the customer pushed out a preventive maintenance cycle
  • Maybe non-approved spares have been used

Actionable Service-BoM

What started as a trivial ask “can you share the service manual of a medium complex product” resulted in a pivotal conversation bridging engineering and service. The service manual is no longer a static 165-page pdf-document sitting in a knowledge repository. It is now an actionable document driving improvement and value in both the service and engineering domains.

[1] When selling products with a transfer-of-title, the risk of maintaining the product transfers to the buyer. Thus, the buyer becomes responsible to mitigate that risk in order to continue receiving the outcome/value of the product. The buyer may purchase maintenance services from OEM or choose differently. Read further in part 3 of this Digital Thread series.

This article is published on Field Service Digital and PTC Blog Site.