Keywords

1 Introduction

The Japan Electronics and Information Technology Industries Association (JEITA) is an industry organization that conducts research, promotes the diffusion of innovations, and makes policy proposals on the latest electronics and information technologies. The authors of this report belong to its control and energy management committee, and a working group of the committee has conducted a general study of the service business in the industrial automation systems business. Specifically, it researched a new service scheme to be applied in the industrial automation industry, aiming to define a value-oriented mechanism and standardization.

2 Background

Many industrial plant owners are having difficulties in outsourcing their internal tasks, as they are urged to restructure their maintenance and operations to survive in the fiercely competitive global market. Such tasks include instrument and device maintenance, system design changes for production enhancement and upgrade, and process performance and quality optimization to maintain secure and efficient plant operation. As those tasks require a wide range of engineering skills and knowledge, it is inherently difficult to reassign internal work procedures to be executed by temporarily out-sourced service provider staff. To overcome the abovementioned service problems in the plant automation fields, the concept of service science [1, 2] gives us new ideas on how to ensure the value of plant automation services. The service science perspective focuses on how to ensure value is created in a scientific manner [3] and how to build new services by using engineering methodology. Some examples in project management firms [4], machine maintenance [5] and aerospace maintenance, repair and overhaul services [6] are typical of similar fields.

3 Issues with Automation Services

At large-scale industrial plants such as oil refineries and petrochemical plants as shown in Fig. 1, an enormous number of sensors and instruments are installed to enable nonstop, year-round safe and stable operations. This involves the use of many service engineers to maintain the production process and equipment. Their tasks vary from simple routine work to dangerous and complex work which needs deep knowledge and many years of experience. For decades employees in the maintenance department of operating companies have carried out daily checks and routine maintenance in the field. As the number of skilled maintenance engineers is decreasing due to retirement and work rationalization, increasing portions of their work are out-sourced.

Fig. 1
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Petrochemical plant

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However, there are many cases where the plant users and service providers are not mutually satisfied with the service pricing and resulting value because the former is usually determined by man-days and hardware cost related to the work. To understand this better, JEITA’s working group conducted a survey in October and November 2012 [10]. The survey comprised of 14 questions regarding service contracting clarity, service quality, service evaluation, and the impact of long product life cycles on service continuity. Each question asks how often a certain problematic situation occurs for the respondent and how it affects prioritization of service issues. The survey was conducted on ten plant users and five automation service providers in face-to-face interviews. The result shows the following five issues are more important among both plant users and service providers:

  1. 1.

    In case of trouble, it is sometimes difficult to determine the specific cause of the problem.

  2. 2.

    Many instruments and devices have been in operation more than 10 years, and it is a burden for both customers and service providers to maintain those that were obsoleted years ago.

  3. 3.

    It is difficult to choose the right service provider with enough capability required for the work.

  4. 4.

    There are miscommunications on the scope of work and the detailed work content.

  5. 5.

    Imported products tend to have more trouble than domestic products because of, for instance, the sales representatives’ sudden end-of-support.

These issues not only obstruct the proper outsourcing of the work but also cause mistakes which may even result in serious accidents at the plant. Table 1 shows an excerpt of the survey results.

Table 1 Industry service survey result (excerpt)
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4 European Automation Service Classes

The issues raised in the previous section are common among large industrial plants worldwide, including those of Japan. Three European automation industry societies, GAMBICA in Great Britain, ZVEI in Germany, and Gimelec in France, are cooperating and acting to establish a unified service scheme called “automation service classes” to classify various types of service work in the automation industry. They defined various criteria with examples to divide automation service work into seven classes [7–9]. They aim to eliminate misunderstandings about the service content, quality, and work level between plant owners as the customer and service providers, so that a greater portion of automation service work can be out-sourced with the correct value and pricing. In their scheme, all automation service work is categorized into seven classes (Classes 0–6) according to the following three criteria:

  1. 1.

    Which party takes the primary responsibility for decision making, either the service provider or the customer?

  2. 2.

    What is the target, either a product (instrument or device) or an integrated system with several products?

  3. 3.

    Is the work predefined, routine and repetitive, or customized for each activity?

Table 2 shows a survey of European service classes and explains the seven class definitions of the European societies showing service class names, descriptions, party with primary responsibility and the service outcome provided to the customer. The service complexity tends to increase as the class number increases, but it should be noted that the higher classes do not necessarily include lower classes.

Table 2 A survey of European automation service classes
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Each class definition is basically equivalent in GAMBICA and ZVEI definitions, but there are some differences. It is notable that advising on application aspects is also included in Class 3 definitions of GAMBICA, which might indicate business practice differences between the UK and Germany. It is also notable that holistic asset management (parts management) to enable plant availability is only included in Class 6 of GAMBICA, while that of ZVEI focuses more on enterprise management level services such as management of a multidisciplinary company group relative to the process.

In addition to each service class definition, Table 3 shows the service scope of each class. Within the product-related services from Classes 0 to 3, Classes 0, 1, and 2 cover the delivered product only, whereas Class 3 covers the usage of the product including the adoption to the application environment and the interface to third-party products. In Class 4, multi-vendor products integrated as a system are the target scope of the services but do not include the production process. Therefore, following on, the main target of Class 5 is the production process, and the target of Class 6 is the complete plant operation with the combination of multiple production processes.

Table 3 Service scope of each class
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5 Japanese Service Classes

As many of the members of the JEITA working group belong to automation service providers, they studied their own business services and categorized them into the seven classes. While keeping the basic concept of the European Automation Service Classes, a new standard and guidelines have been made, suited for Japanese work practices.

The following three points apply to the redefinition of Japanese service classes:

  1. (a)

    Japanese service classes will replicate European class definitions if those of ZVEI and GAMBICA are equivalent.

  2. (b)

    Japanese service classes will make new or merged definitions if they currently exist and are different.

  3. (c)

    Japanese service classes will not define their own if both European service class definitions are insufficient or missing. These will be kept open for each service provider to define.

Table 4 shows the overview of Japanese Service Classes. It elaborates important discussion points for categorizing various service works.

Table 4 Japanese automation service classes
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  1. 1.

    Scope and objective of the service

    The objective of a service is to help the customer to achieve his/her target. One of the important factors of classification by service classes is whether the delivered product and/or system functions properly or the production system and/or process function properly meets the customer’s targets and satisfaction. In other words, the class is differentiated according to whether the service target (i.e., the target product, system or application of a service) is what the service provider delivered or the plant owner operates. In Classes 1, 2, and 4, the service completion is judged by the product or system providers’ criteria, whereas in Classes 3, 5, and 6, the service completion is judged by the plant owners operation and work standards or criteria

  2. 2.

    Primary responsibility of the service

    Although the customer reserves the right to make the final decision, the service provider undertakes primary judgment of the work in some of their service work. In Classes 1, 2, and 4, the plant owner as the customer defines the precise service requirements. Service execution scheduling constraints depend on the plant operation, so the customer takes the main responsibility for the service and the service provider supports them. On the other hand, in Classes 3, 5, and 6, the service provider undertakes the definition of service requirements and the service execution responsibility by fully understanding the customers operations, work procedures, and constraints.

6 Example of Service Class Applications

As a practical use case for the service class scheme, Table 5 shows the comparison between a repair service and an engineering service for each class.

Table 5 Comparison of service contents utilizing service class scheme
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6.1 Repair Services

A repair service is the service to restore malfunctioning instruments and devices to a normal condition. In this case, the plant owner consigns a repair service for a product which cannot be repaired during daily maintenance work. The service contract can take several forms from a spot repair order after the trouble to an annual plant-wide maintenance contract. A certain level of field customization could be included as part of Class 1 if it is clearly described in the service menu or contract as a differentiating advantage of the service provider. Occasionally in Class 2 field services, some field engineers customize the service at their discretion. This should theoretically be classified to Class 3.

Some service providers offer a customized package service to cover yearly maintenance including product diagnostics and repair, parts maintenance, and replacement which can be regarded as Class 2 services.

Classes 4–6 are marked as “n/a: not applicable” on this table, because an automation system is a combination of products and in these cases repair services can be regarded as a combination of lower classes.

6.2 Engineering Services

An engineering service includes various work procedures from selecting control instruments and systems to match the process design, specification and piping, and instrument definition to installation and start-up of the selected products. Front-End Engineering Design (FEED) service is the control design work including the piping and instrumentation diagram (P&ID) definition. There are also engineering services to take over the complete construction planning and test run of a plant, as well as consulting services for plant operation.

Engineering services are defined and customized for each plant; therefore, there are no Class 0 and 1 services. The service providers are required to have consulting capabilities in the higher classes. Class 4 system and application services may include some elements of Class 5 services when they cannot be clearly separated or the service provider decides to combine as part of their marketing strategy. The consultation service here is to investigate the current plant operation and to make proposals for control design/configuration changes to improve or optimize its production performance, improve productivity or quality index, etc.

7 Discussions

Essentially, the class definitions are consistent among three service classes of ZVEI, GAMBICA, and Japan. However, actual implementation can be differentiated to meet local business practices. In that sense, examples of services in each class are very important to unify the service class scheme in each country.

The benefits of clear definition and adoption of the “automation service classes” are as follows:

  1. 1.

    Customer benefits

    • Enable the comparison and selection of the right service products and service providers using objective criteria

    • Enable optimization of service expenditure by evaluating the service contents and completion criteria

  2. 2.

    Service provider benefits

    • Promote service value-oriented pricing (not by head count and man-days)

    • Service providers can differentiate their expertise from others by value, not price competition

  3. 3.

    Customer and Service provider benefits

    • Avoid misunderstanding and miscommunication between both parties with clear separation of responsibilities.

    • A smooth contract can be realized by sharing a common business platform.

These benefits can contribute to overcoming the issues listed in chapter “A Method for Supporting Customer Model Construction: Using a Topic Model for Public Service Design” of this paper.

The current status of “automation service classes” in Japan is still in draft form. It is being reviewed by the relevant industry experts. According to GAMBICA which published the automation service classes in the UK, the new scheme has been well accepted among some of the automation system providers, and it has been applied to their service menus. However, it is not widely accepted among the plant operators and the new scheme does not seem to be spreading. GAMBICA thinks good understanding by the plant owners is essential for the further diffusion of the new scheme. They are providing online service classification tools for the easier adoption of existing services to JEITA’s working group discussed ways to diffuse the scheme with plant owners and other service providers. For the next step, a certification system for the “automation service class” providers, government guidance, and standardization should be considered.

8 Conclusion

This paper has explained a new service scheme named “automation service classes” whose goal is to realize easier and more effective out-sourced contracting of automation services at industrial plants. “Japanese Automation Service Classes” has been redefined with reference to preceding “European Automation Service Classes” cases while supplementing their differences with each other and missing definitions. The industrial plant owners are being urged to transfer expert work which used to be executed by their internal engineers. Classification is not merely subdivision or fragmentation of existing service practice but is rather a logical mapping of tacit knowledge in the field work to explicit knowledge so that the optimal management of out-sourced service is enabled while keeping the unique Japanese advantages of flexible and reasonable mindset for services. The “Automation Service Classes” is expected to contribute to overcoming the issues related to service outsourcing and realize an innovation for the industry.