Re-engineering the Way Maintenance Data Are Collected and Analysed: The Service Report

Manufacturing companies are strongly investing in offerings based on combinations of products and services—known as Product Service Systems (PSS)—for establishing long-lasting relationships with customers under the premise that services can extend the products’ useful life and create additional value. Despite this, it is difficult to deliver services efficiently and effectively. Thus, companies must identify flaws in their service delivery offering and tackle them, with data collection and analysis used as the main leverage for this. In the case of the maintenance service, technicians’ reports constitute the main source of knowledge since they contain information on failure causes, recurrent problems, or optimal strategies for their resolution, and can be used to create the maintenance engineering knowledge necessary to drive improvements. That said, maintenance data collection should be organized in a way that allows proper collection and categorization avoiding blank fields or wrong filling. This is a necessary step to allow effective and reliable analysis. Building on this premise, through a case study, the chapter aims at discussing how data collection can be improved to favour the analysis, the creation of new maintenance-related knowledge and, thus, the improvement of maintenance service management and delivery.