A model for considering the impact of rescheduling planned maintenance activities in a maintenance service contract

Abstract

Maintenance services are becoming increasingly relevant and both service providers and users are paying more attention to cost and service level. Nonetheless, until now very little attention has been devoted for understanding and evaluating rescheduling costs which can be quite relevant, particularly if maintenance is outsourced to external providers. This article proposes a model to measure the costs for rescheduling maintenance interventions, thus allowing to take them into consideration both when defining a service contract and when running it. The model has been developed after a wide empirical analysis deployed in two phases: a first exploratory phase aimed at identifying the variables of the rescheduling problem by interviewing the main maintenance service providers in Italy; the second, a confirmatory phase has been developed validating the model using data from real industrial setting and analysing the results with the managers who supplied the data.

• outsourcing
• maintenance service contracts
• rescheduling
• cost model

Acknowledgements

We would like to acknowledge the anonymous reviewers for their constructive and helpful comments. This research is part of the activities performed by ASAP service management, a network of Universities and Companies devoted to the development and dissemination of improvements in managing services.