Delivering after-sales maintenance services for advanced capital goods is challenging as you have to balance the performance for multiple key performance indicators (costs of maintenance, system downtime, and possibly carbon emissions) and you have to coordinate the planning of service engineers and the spare parts supply chain. Besides you have to deal with many critical, heterogeneous components with different types of degradation and maintenance policies (age-based, condition-based, failure-based).

In this talk, we present on research that has been executed in collaboration with OEM’s of advanced capital goods who operate in (almost) all continents and provide after sales maintenance services for a large installed base. First, we look at the development of a scalable, engineer-friendly maintenance policy for agricultural systems with many heterogeneous components. This policy makes use of semi-urgent preventive replacements for components with a condition-based maintenance policy. In that way, the amount of unplanned maintenance actions executed outside the regular working hours of service engineers is reduced, and hence this policy contributes to keeping the after sales work attractive for service engineers. Second, we look at the spare parts planning for the after sales supply chain of an OEM of lithography systems. We discuss the multi-item planning method that balances the mean uptime per system and the total spare parts costs and we present a newly developed policy that limits the expensive long downtimes for the installed systems.

Geert-Jan van Houtum is Professor of Maintenance and Reliability at the Department Industrial Engineering and Innovation Sciences (IE&IS) of Eindhoven University of Technology since 2008. Prior to that he filled positions as assistant and associate professor at the same department (1999-2007) and the University of Twente (1994-1998) and as visiting professor at Carnegie Mellon University (2001). He obtained his M.Sc. and Ph.D. degree in Applied Mathematics from Eindhoven University of Technology in 1990 and 1995, respectively. Since October 2024, he serves as dean of the Dept. IE&IS.

His research is focused on the maintenance and reliability of capital goods, and in particular on: (i) Predictive maintenance concepts for capital goods; (ii) Design and control of service supply chains; (iii) Life cycle analysis of capital goods. He has over 100 publications in international refereed journals such as Operations Research, Manufacturing and Service Operations Management, IISE Transactions, European Journal of Operational Research, OR Spectrum, and International Journal of Production Economics. Together with Bram Kranenburg, he wrote a book on “Spare Parts Inventory Control under System Availability Constraints”.

Much of his research is in cooperation with the industry. He works with companies such as ASML, Dutch Railways, Philips, Océ-Canon, Lely, Marel, the Royal Dutch Navy, Thales, and Vanderlande.