Abstract
The availability of effective global communication facilities nowadays has changed the business goals and practices of many enterprises that develop complex engineering products. They need to remain competitive by developing innovative products and processes which are specific to individual customer's requirements, completely packaged and made available globally to make best use of resources within defined constraints. The complexity of these engineering products also means the need for developing support services such as system commissioning, on-going support, mid-life upgrades, maintenance and repairs. To address these issues, business systems across company boundaries are established and operate across time and space with world-wide distributed functions of manufacturing, sales, customer support, engineering, quality assurance, project management and operations control. These business systems exist in the form of customer support centres, information infrastructure, user groups, multi-disciplinary engineering teams, supply chains, distribution networks, and so on. Operations of these engineering units in a globally distributed environment present significant challenges to the management of the engineering system developers.
The conventional approach to support complex engineering products has been “asset centred”, bottom-up, tactical response to the need of sustaining the built environment. As customers are moving from conventional organic support approaches to strategic outsourcing for complete capability sustainment solutions, the roles and responsibilities of contractors have changed dramatically, for example, in the new “performance-based contracting” practice.
The concept of designing enterprise systems for sustainment and productivity gains sharing is emerging in the last few years (IfM, 2007). Researchers tried to develop the conceptual framework of engineering services and support, in response to mounting pressures for managing highly complex, large scale systems economically. They found that the new engineering management paradigm demands broad skills and competencies in several traditional knowledge domains including systems engineering, logistics engineering, supply chain management and engineering design.
The key in engineering business management for global operations is the incorporation of service science into a system engineering approach to develop support solutions (Abe, 2004). Service science is qualitatively different to the product-based approach where hard artefacts are delivered to and becomes the responsibility of the customer. Service is a negotiated exchange of value adding activities with the customer to provide intangible outputs that are usually co-produced with the customer.
In service oriented businesses, service engineering and system engineering are used together as critical reasoning agents to guide the solution design – they are compatible partners, but hitherto they have not often been employed in unison. Service engineering emphasises the customisation of solution designs to meet service needs, while system engineering emphasises the technical performance of the solution. Hence, “Service and Support” is a strategic business model in which interactions with the customer are enduring, like the systems they support, and a support solution seeks to cement a constructive long term customer relationship.
Service is a dynamic and complex activity. In all services, irrespective of industry sectors or types of customers, services are co-produced with and truly involve the consumer. Hence, no two service solution designs are identical because each service case and each consumer need is different. Due to the highly individualised nature of a service, it is an extremely knowledge intensive, labour rich business.
In order to achieve the same degree of economy as the manufacturing of products, we need to “productise” services using appropriate modelling methods (Mo and Menzel, 1998). Traditionally, engineers that work in asset intensive industries are specialists in their own field and their expertise may only be required for one component of the total asset. For example, aerospace engineers specialise in aircraft structures and reliability issues and marine engineers are experts in ship design and on-board systems. However, as a result of technology advances during the last couple of decades, new engineering equipment have become more sophisticated and highly integrated. Therefore, the issue of supporting the equipment as a cost effective total solution to address the customer's needs has to be approached with multi-disciplinary teams, which will include non-engineers. The future skills required in this environment will be very different to the traditional skills set for engineers and can not be gained solely from experience in the workplace.
Since services are inherently complex systems with noise (i.e. one that is subject to significant variations between cases) we need to (a) standardize and integrate processes; (b) adopt labour-saving technology, and (c) mix-and-match repeatable services and solutions. This means we need to make service delivery more like a manufacturing process, so that the demand for human skill is minimised and the reusability of elements is maximised. A thorough understanding of the nature of services is critical to the design of a successful service solution.
The International Journal of Engineering Business Management is a refereed research journal which aims to promote the multi-disciplinary and integration among engineering, business and management. The journal focuses on issues related to the design, development and implementation of new methodologies and technologies, which improve the strategic and operational objectives of an organization in a dynamic global business environment. This special issue explores design methods, modelling languages, reference frameworks, services and architectures for enterprise systems development that tackle the problems in global engineering operations. The papers selected for publication have strong emphasis on the need for understanding the provision of services in engineering operations. The type of service industry described in these papers range from global professional engineering services provider to local hospital health care units. In all cases, strong engineering expertise is involved in the development of the operational system that provides the services, but in addition, thorough system engineering analysis is required to ensure an effective and optimal engineering business in service.
The paper “Modelling a global EPCM (Engineering, Procurement and Construction Management) Enterprise” uses a case study to explore new modelling methods for modern enterprises which have engineering services businesses. The paper “Power Industry Reliability Coordination in Asia in a Market Environment” examines the key success factor in service industry is reliability. The paper uses the outcome of studies of the power industry in three Asian countries to illustrate the specific features of economic interrelations between the power supply organization and consumers in reliability assurance. Global engineering operations inevitably involves network of enterprises. The paper “An Analysis of Trust Transitivity Taking Base Rate into Account” analyses the transitivity of trust in an interconnected network environment; such as the Internet. The quantitative analysis presented in this paper uses subjective logic to assist businesses managing their trust relationships.
The paper “A Collaboration Service Model for a Global Port Cluster” proposes the concept of “collaboration services” that unites port operators to form clusters with better services to a region. Instead of a static publicly owned infrastructure, a service oriented “public user portal” has better utilisation, shared knowledge and information systems. The paper “Centralization of Intensive Care Units: Process Reengineering in Hospital” describes a case study that centralizes a hospital's intensive care units and achieves significant efficiency gains. The result is a good reference for health care operators to reengineer their service models.
The research in enterprise systems design for global engineering operations aims to create the business environment that promotes cross fertilization of multi-disciplinary engineering skills. The papers in this special issue have achieved their specific objectives and contributed to the understanding of global engineering operations significantly.