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Projects
Service Support Solutions
KT-Box & IMRC MDash
In the current climate, the industrial sector is increasingly characterised by longer product life cycles and asset availability demands. There is likely to be a reduction in the number of major acquisition projects in the future. This, combined with organisational changes and the fact that both governmental and commercial sectors are steering towards contracting for capability, has led to an internal shift in manufacturing centric companies. These traditional companies are now providing service offerings for their products, thereby reducing customer oriented risk. The services aspect includes the use of new technologies and methods for managing technical products over their life cycle and ensuring that customers’ required capability and availability demands are met. This imposes new challenges on subsequent maintenance, repair and capability enhancement procedures. A framework for the development of an integrated approach is thus proposed. The underlying purpose behind the framework being to establish an approach that supports the decision making process on whether to maintain, repair, upgrade or update a given asset. Through incorporating maintenance and capability enhancement, both facets are considered in their entirety as opposed to in isolation.
The PMC was previously involved in the 2 year S4T Research Programme (ended Dec 2009). The aim of which was to create an academic focus to inform and lead the continuing transformation of the UK economy towards increasing value generation from product related services. Nottingham co-ordinated the Combined Maintenance & Capability Enhancement section of the S4T programme with its industrial partners.
The PMC are currently partners in a Knowledge Transfer Agreement; KT-Box. KT-Box aims to take recent research findings from engineering, technology, business and the social sciences and turn them into tools, techniques and processes suitable for widespread adoption by UK industry and the public sector. All KT-Box partners are previous members of the S4T consortium. The PMC are also running a project in the services field titled 'Integration of Preventive Maintenance and Capability Enhancement for Extended Product Life Cycles'. This project is funded by the Nottingham Innovative Manufacturing Centre.
Funding Bodies: Engineering & Physical Sciences Research Council, BAE Systems.
Industrial Partners: BAE Systems
Academic Partners: University of Cambridge, University of Bath, University of Cranfield, Cranfield Defence & Security, University of Exeter
Technical Lead: Prof Svetan Ratchev
Project Team: Dr Emma Kelly
Project Websites:
www.nottingham.ac.uk/NIMRC/Research/SustainableManufacturing/ExtendedProductLifeCycle
www.ifm.eng.cam.ac.uk/ktbox/