Support Service Solutions: Strategy and Transition

The service industries today represent over 70% of all employment in the USA and Europe and this figure is increasing at a significant rate. Even from within the manufacturing sector, organisations view a significant percentage of their efforts being service-related, and increasingly manufacturers are exploring strategies for evolving their product offerings into service-based ones. The overall vision for the research proposed is to establish an academic focus that will inform and lead the continued transformation of the UK economy towards increasing value generation from product related services. It will immediately benefit current practitioners, especially in aerospace and defence through the development and application of related research thinking, and provide a clear academic foundation to lead the development of capability increasingly critical to the UK economy.In April 2007, BAE Systems and EPSRC issued a call for expressions of interest and a proposal in the area of Support Service Engineering Solutions. The call was based on the urgent need to develop research thinking to underpin the transformation of the UK defence industry towards more efficient integrated service-oriented support solutions for complex engineering assets. New research, using both service science research and also strong foundations in manufacturing research as a base, is needed to guide and accelerate emerging practice, and to ensure that engineering and management aspects of this discipline are addressed in parallel with business and strategy issues. Whilst focussed on the defence sector imperative, the research and codification of best practice in integrated solutions is of interest to other sectors where producer manufacturers are looking to the value-add from product based support services such as Transportation, Automotive Services and Healthcare. The research is novel in that it takes a truly multi-disciplined stance in addressing service provision issues within industries underpinned by complex engineering systems.In order to address this growing industrial imperative in an effective manner, a programme divided into five sections / referred to as Work Packages / is proposed. Four Work Packages address issues of importance to the development of support service solutions and a fifth is focussed on ensuring a tight cohesion between the activities and on providing an overall direction for the field. The Work Packages are:WP1 / Organisation Transformation WP2 / Service Information Strategy WP3 / Risk & Cost Assessment WP4 / Combined Maintenance & Capability Enhancement WP5 / Integration & Co-ordinationLed by Professor Duncan McFarlane the programme draws on experienced academics from nine different universities and builds a future model for support service solutions from a multi-dimensional perspective. Programme Investigators:Prof Duncan McFarlane (University of Cambridge)Dr Nigel Caldwell (University of Bath) Dr Richard Curran (Queen's University) Prof Andrew Graves (University of Bath) Prof Michael Henshaw (University of Loughborough) Wg Cdr Chris Hockley RAF (Rtd) (Defence Academy)Prof Alison McKay (University of Leeds) Dr Irene Ng (University of Exeter) Dr. Ken Platts (University of Cambridge) Mr David Probert (University of Cambridge) Prof Rajkumar Roy (University of Cranfield) Dr. Ashutosh Tiwari (University of Cranfield)Prof Wenbin Wang (Salford University) The consortium will address technological, operational and strategic issues and using an integration activity to tie the work together in a comprehensive model. The research will simultaneously develop a blueprint for next-generation industrial service organisations and establish route maps for industrial organisations seeking to make a transition. It will also provide an academic base and leadership for the UK in a research field which is likely to grow significantly in the coming years.