Companies are changing their business model in order to improve their long term
competitiveness. Once where they provided only products, they are now
providing a service with that product resulting in a reduced cost of ownership.
Such a business case benefits both customer and service supplier only if the
availability of the product, and hence the service, is optimised. For highly
integrated product and service offerings this means it is necessary to assess the
reliability monitoring service which underpins service availability.
Reliability monitoring service assessment requires examination of not only
product monitoring capability but also the effectiveness of the maintenance
response prompted by the detection of fault conditions. In order to address these
seemingly dissimilar aspects of the reliability monitoring service, a methodology
is proposed which defines core aspects of both the product and service
organisation. These core aspects provide a basis from which models of both the
product and service organisation can be produced.
The models themselves though not functionally representative, portray the
primary components of each type of system, the ownership of these system
components and how they are interfaced. These system attributes are then
examined to establish system risk to reliability by inspection, evaluation of the
model or by reference to model source documentation.
The result is a methodology that can be applied to such large scale, highly
integrated systems at either an early stage of development or in latter
development stages. The methodology will identify weaknesses in each system
type, indicating areas which should be considered for system redesign and will
also help inform the analyst of whether or not the reliability monitoring service as
a whole meets the requirements of the proposed business case