The attractiveness of the aftermarket segment has been enabling Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) of complex engineering systems to reposition themselves from being pure manufacturers to providers of through-life engineering services (TES). The provision of high-value engineered product sales in conjunction with product support services has enabled companies in offering TES strategies for their customers and assuring that the product's function is available for use throughout the product's design life. As a result, OEMs can add real incremental low-cost service value to their customers, establishing a competitive advantage to secure market share and defending or growing their service revenue streams. The key for OEMs to enabling TES solutions is to have unique access to in-depth technical product knowledge amidst analytics on big operational data. The challenge, however, is to design a reusable and optimised TES architecture that is capable of implementation across a broad range of industry use-cases.
This ambitious project proposes DO-TES, a digitally optimised (DO) through-life engineering services (TES) architecture that encompasses legacy TES practices with digital technology such as advanced sensing systems and big data analytics. It aims to introduce intelligent and adaptive maintenance to sophisticated engineered products, resulting in a more prominent, cost-effective and safer in-service operation for the OEM market. More specifically, the project concentrates on accelerating the adoption of leading world-class TES practises within the UK national industry, resulting in increased market competitiveness for the sector through the reduction of product lifetime costs. By 2025, the DO-TES project envisions achieving the goal of 20% reduction in through-life cost with 20% increase in availability during the life of a complex engineered product across the breadth of UK manufacturing sector output, in particular for the UK sectors of aerospace and rail.
The DO-TES project is led by OEM aerospace partners Rolls-Royce UK, BAE Systems and Bombardier Transportation, with a consortium of leading universities, software platform providers and market disseminators as partners will provide accessible TES resources for study. The project will enable its outputs to lead the creation of the world’s first standardised approach for the TES sector to yield a margin of potential cost reduction to OEM's revenue, opening financial opportunities for future products and services development.
The Supply Chain AI Lab is currently focussing on large-scale supply chain optimisation algorithms, and risk prediction methods for spare parts management.
Funded by: Innovate UK, ATI
Industrial Partners: Rolls Royce, BAE Systems, Bombardier
