Today, the amount of hybrid products is increasing. Hybrid products consist on one hand of a physical good like a wind mill and on the other hand of services around the physical good. SKF GmbH and H2O GmbH are currently presenting the results of a research effort supported by the EU Commission to create an integrated reference model for maintenance processes around industrial goods.
In this presentation, SKF is represented by Stefan Schleyer. SKF is for example providing maintenance services around physical goods like wind mills. The presentation is supported by Herbert Heinzel of H2O GmbH, which was founded as a spin-off by Siemens more than 5 years ago.
Maintenance processes for industrial goods can usually be not provided by a single service provider like SKF, but instead several service providers have to work together to deliver the needed capabilities. In addition, integration with the suppliers of the physical good is needed, for example to ensure that the goods are designed in a way to enable efficient maintenance.
The effort of SKF and H2O is focusing on this complex integration problem. Together with 20 European partners they defined an architecture for Integration Reference Models (IRM). As a first step, all suppliers modelled their service maintenance processes using ARIS Business Architect. Afterwards, they abstracted from those specific maintenance processes by defining different reference maintenance processes. To validate the newly created reference processes, each supplier in the project checked if the reference process still delivers the needed capabilities.
They evaluated their overall approach with different use-cases. In one use-case they focused on ERP integration between the different service providers. They defined some web services for this integration. They used ARIS SOA Architect to describe the service-oriented business processes and to annotate it with the web service descriptions.
Such efforts like those presented by SKF and H2O are important to enable good integration between different companies. The reference models can be used for documenting and standardising services, which makes the service offering more efficient. Even though their work is still research, we will definitely see similar efforts in the future. Currently, they are approaching public standardisation bodies like OMG and DIN to officially publish their work.
