SaaS

[digitalcarbon]

I get the OpenBOM news letter and I'm looking for feed back on the following.  Does this change the way we would do our stuff?? Trying to wrap my head around it.

 

"I was taking some time earlier this week to think about manufacturing transformation. Have you heard the word XaaS? This abbreviation stands for "everything X" as a service. You probably heard about SaaS until now. Actually, OpenBOM is SaaS (Software as a Service). But changes are not stopping here. XaaS is a general, collective term that refers to the delivery of anything as a service. It recognizes the vast number of products, tools and technologies that vendors now deliver to users as a service over a network -- typically the internet -- rather than provide locally or on-site within an enterprise.

Amazon, Netflix, Uber, Zipcar... These are only a few examples. However, large industrial companies are also following the trend XaaS as well. Rolls Roys, SKF, Michelin. These are only a few examples of companies that stopped selling products and selling services instead - mile, times and other consumables while providing equipment to their customers. 

It brings up a very important topic-  in the past most the companies stopped collecting detailed information about products at the time product was shipped to a customer. But moving to XaaS is changing the model. Now you need to know much more about the product than before. You want to know what is in the product, how it is serviced, maintained and used. To collect this information is not a simple thing. 

We observe a strong trend of using online Bill of Materials to share and collect information about the product with customers. Actually your customers. OpenBOM Bill of Materials can be shared online as part of the service manual and help your customers to perform certain maintenance and repair work, order part replacement and share information about product use...." 
 

[digitalcarbon]

this is the link for the above...https://medium.com/@openbom/the-role-of-online-bill-of-materials-in-the-future-maintenance-and-support-operations-35bd3d142af3

[Art V]

I can see the potential benefits as they describe (e.g. knowing the right parts for maintenance), but only if there is a tight control on what is shared with whom and how. You don't want your hard work to get leaked out to copycats if there is a leak somewhere. Of course some of this info may already be in paper service manuals etc. but this online sharing is a step further as it probably needs access to the full data to be able to show only a part of it in various versions for varies kinds of users.

 

Plus... who is going to be responsible/liable for keeping things up to date for the online information with revisions (e.g. newer parts used after improvements, keeping track of old parts for older versions of a product, change of supplier of parts etc. etc.) which is something that may take quite a bit of your time to do it right and avoid (costly) mistakes. Especially in the mechanical engineering field this can become a very complex thing to handle.

 

I think this will benefit the big companies more than the smaller ones as the big ones do have the resources to do this properly and efficiently and when large clients/authorities (local, regional or national) start to demand this kind of thing in projects then the small(er) companies might be losing out in the long(er) run.