I was recently told that my kitchen oven was too old to repair. The alternative is to install a new one, which would be much easier for the gas people I had contacted. It seemed to be wasteful to dispose of a piece of equipment that until then had worked perfectly, for a period of almost 20 years. At least in my part of the world, it seems as though many of our systems are configured to supply new equipment, rather to replace what we already have. Talking to colleagues involved in the disposal of waste equipment, it appears that a large proportion of the items are still in a good operating condition, or have one fault. Domestic users seem, from this tiny shred of evidence, to be very quick to buy new. It is not unusual for household equipment to be disposed of when changing the colour scheme of a kitchen. This must seem ridiculous–even unacceptable–in places where equipment is not so easily available. In contrast, more expensive industrial goods from buildings, ships and power stations down to pumps and valves are designed and operated with planned maintenance and repair in mind from the start, and the infrastructure of service engineering companies is in place.
The obvious difference between the domestic and industrial settings is that the investment of money in each item is generally much higher in the industrial setting. In fact, the domestic world has its own repair infrastructure for higher value items such as cars and some domestic equipment. But looking from a resource or energy perspective, the millions of lower value items in households represent a massive investment in energy and materials, which is lost on disposal. Perhaps, as we increasingly look at resource and energy conservation, it will become more attractive to repair rather than replace.
This raises some questions for operations management. The vast majority of manufacturing companies seem to have little involvement in the repair and maintenance of the equipment they supply. In many industries their commitment extends to producing spare parts for a certain period of time, and this is often where third party companies can intervene to provide parts and services, sometimes with and sometimes without the co-operation of the original equipment manufacturer. Is it acceptable that repair and maintenance should continue to be largely outside the responsibility of manufacturers, leading to a fairly patchy coverage dependent on location? How should manufacturing companies configure themselves to take on repairs?
Research attention on remanufacturing has shown that a major area of development is in designing equipment in such a way as to make the replacement of modules more easy, so that items that wear out can be replaced and allow the unit to continue to operate, in the same way that we maintain cars by changing the tyres from time to time. Beside these design changes, which are not so much the focus of operations managers, there needs to be a change to the companies themselves–repair and maintenance are service operations. In repair the business is not so much about supplying items, as we do in normal manufacturing, but more about performing activities for a client. The business is not about selling things but about doing things; the business model, and many of the assumptions we make about doing business, will be different.
Articles in Production Planning & Control have been largely concerned with manufacture, but perhaps more attention should be given to services. How different is it to operate services, compared to operating manufacturing? We have had some work on these issues, but there seems to be a lot left to do. Do tensions exist in companies that operate manufacturing and service? If these operations are managed in different ways, we should be able to learn from the experiences of those companies. Should we allow service operations to be outsourced? Does that mean that service provision will continue to be patchy?
I was able to indentify aftermarket suppliers of parts for my oven–although not without more effort than most consumers would be expected to make. The problem turned out to be a maintenance one–a gas jet was blocked, and no parts were needed. This is one product that will avoid disposal for a little longer, but it was not easy to get the service required. There seems to be plenty more work to do to encourage the reduction of waste of part-used equipment. Production Planning & Control would welcome papers on any aspect of improving the management of service operations and the reduction of waste.