The Use of a Service Modeler Together with a PLM Software for the Management of Product-Related Services: A First Use-case-based Approach to Configure Service Components for Product-Related Services

摘要

For most goods-producing companies the provision of product-related services is already a necessary commodity (Wildemann 2009). Such services are regarded as necessary attachment to a successful production of goods by most companies. To manage products and services, companies rely on different methods and tools that span the entire lifecycle (Sendler 2009). With the goal of raising efficiency and quality at affordable costs, those methods and tools are implemented or supported with the help of information systems such as PLM/PDM solutions. In this context, it is observed that the development and management of services, even though, they increasingly become a vital part for many companies, is neglected. Furthermore a systematic, tool-supported approach using the existing PLM/PDM-systems can be seen as problem area (Blinn et al. 2009). The objective of our paper is to minimize problems with product related services such as fitting cost estimation, matters of quality control and communication inhouse or with the customer. Therefore, existing management approaches of service engineering (Ganz et al. 2010) need to find their implementation within PLM/PDM systems in a way, that product related services can be handled throughout the lifecycle and interrelationships between product and service (e.g. a maintenance service for a certain sold machine) can be accounted for. Our scope is the establishment of a Service Lifecycle Management for product related services. Our work is based on case study work conducted in the field of engineering that supports the problem and objective. Therefore, as results we can show the validated problem field and exemplary demonstrate with the help of the ARAS Innovator PLM solution (Aras Corporation 2012) and the Service Modeller (Klingner et al. 2011) how product related services can be developed and managed by using a service lifecycle PLM tool. The example focusses especially on the configuration of service components and how service instances can be connected to product data.