A Decision Support Tool for Optimising Support Site Configuration of Functional Products

The customization of the support site configuration (including the number, locations and capabilities of sites where maintenance staff are based) is of critical importance to functional product providers, who must provide maintenance support services for products operated by their customers at different locations and ensure that contractual guarantees for functional availability are met whilst keeping support costs under control. Since contract fulfilment costs are performance based and long term, they are difficult to predict without modelling. This paper discusses a decision support tool designed for use by management and engineering personnel at Functional Product providers to analyse and optimize the performance of their support base configuration. It features a graphical user interface for configuration customization, simulation modelling to predict performance and outputs a wide range of analytics that can be used to compare and optimize configurations. The tool is demonstrated via application to an industrial test case.