Service Engineering and Maintenance Management
Outages are not only cost factors; they also offer opportunities to rethink maintenance, develop better services, make processes more resilient, and create new value. This course provides a comprehensive understanding of strategic maintenance as well as the development, design, and management of industrial services.
The Service Engineering track covers product-service systems, customer-centric service design and modeling, the structured development of business models, and the technological, economic, and organizational aspects of service innovations. The Maintenance Management track focuses on strategies, organizational and collaborative structures, technologies, and assistance systems, as well as established and innovative concepts for planning, analyzing, and optimizing maintenance processes. Data-driven approaches, circularity, resilience, and economic evaluation are examined across all areas.
Real-world examples provide direct insights into industrial applications.
Moodle Workspace
The course uses a flipped classroom approach. During the out-of-class phase, students work through the fundamentals independently using digital microlearning modules, readings, videos, and interactive applications. The materials are made available via Moodle.
The weekly in-class session combines a lecture with integrated exercises. The prepared content is discussed and applied to real-world or realistic problems. Working individually and in groups, students analyze initial situations, select appropriate methods, and develop and reflect on solutions for strategic maintenance processes, innovative industrial services, and business models.
Guest lectures and, when possible, a field trip complement the course with practical insights. The learning process is continuously applied, deepened, and reflected upon through the portfolio assessment that accompanies the course.
After completing the course “Maintenance and Service Management,” students will be able to gain an understanding of the management of industrial services by…
- explain the relevance of maintenance to corporate logistics,
- acquire and test approaches to describing, planning, and improving maintenance management (including the fundamentals of ISM,
- maintenance strategies, concepts, organization, and controlling), and
- draw conclusions regarding the implications for maintenance management from the perspectives of digitalization (e.g., predictive maintenance), sustainability, and resilience,
- classify the potential of industrial services within value-added networks,
- acquire approaches for describing industrial services (fundamentals of service management and service engineering),
- Identify differences between products and services in terms of development and use, and derive business models from these differences, and
- identify the challenges and opportunities of cross-organizational collaboration, including the use of innovative key technologies (e.g., artificial intelligence, blockchain).
The portfolio assessment accompanies this learning process throughout the entire semester. As part of this process, students produce several pieces of work (artifacts) during the course, which are created as part of assignments and serve to apply, deepen, and reflect on what they have learned. The portfolio is supplemented by a final oral or written exam administered by the department. The final grade is determined by the evaluation of all examination components. The specific structure of the portfolio assessment will be announced at the beginning of the semester in the respective course. The examination regulations are governed by the currently valid examination regulations.