December 15, 2017
The goal of the Services for Fleet program (2014-2017) was to innovate industrial services that build on the ongoing digital transformation and leverage the existing global fleet of equipment and people. The program results include about 30 business outcomes, almost 200 academic publications, and a large number of internal and public seminars. The program consortium created a number of business coalitions between industrial and software companies, and hence established a platform for future cross-industry results. The exciting future opportunities include real-time management and performance optimisation of entire production processes and other ecosystem level systems.
RESULT
The DIMECC S4Fleet program was implemented during a period of disruptive change in industrial operations, exchange, and technology. Digitalization of industrial operations enables completely new methods of value creation, but brings a need and an opportunity for closer cooperation between business ecosystem members; calls for internal changes in organizational structures, incentives, and management; and requires new business practices for gaining and leveraging customer understanding. Simultaneously with digitalization, industrial companies respond to competitive pressures and exploit new opportunities through service-led growth. Hence, the key goal of the S4Fleet program was to identify opportunities by combining three elements: the installed base of equipment and people, increasing availability of information from industrial (and other) processes, and the business transformation toward services.
Industrial services can be analyzed as functionality preserving, availability guaranteeing, performance improving, operational outsourcing, and fleet-level optimizing services. Generally, digitalization of function- and availability-related services presented rather low-hanging fruit for the consortium, while genuine fleet-level innovations remain less frequent. However, the program has identified and implemented services and concepts that build on fleet-specific topics, such as benchmarking specific equipment and processes against the entire fleet, to identify improvement opportunities, a fleet management platform concept, fleet data management standards, and similar results, helping to leverage fleet-specific opportunities. In a slightly narrowed scope, many of the digital innovations leverage production-generated data for control, prevention, and optimization of the process itself. The digital information also supports process development, task allocation, and near real-time evaluation of business performance. S4Fleet has also developed generic business value assessment practices to support performance-based agreements between business partners, evaluate the benefits of service outsourcing decisions, and communicate service value. These examples illustrate the spread of innovative services across the service categories. Until now, more than 30 business results have been published, around 140 articles and book chapters published, and three books released.
The results achieved were disseminated through a large number of program events, including annual program seminars, company hosted workshops to explored the key cross-project themes, more than ten open seminars with a total of more than 300 visitors, doctoral seminars and development workshops, international researcher exchange, and conference participation.
Take a closer look at the results of DIMECC S4Fleet program here!
