A consensus construction to understand and improve factors affecting service technicians’ response time performance in stationary equipment corrective maintenance

Purpose/objectives: This research deals with the development of a consensus construction to understand and to optimize factors affecting service technicians response time in corrective maintenance processes for stationary equipment, i.e. equipment that can generally not be re-located for maintenance and repair, in different business areas, i.e. elevator, mining equipment and IT hardware. In this context, the goal of this research is to identify competitive objectives with respect to corrective maintenance, factors that are perceived to influence service technicians in this process as well as perceived improvement opportunities. Based on this, a consensus construction to be utilized in the researched community has been developed in order to optimize the according response times. The construct may also be used as a baseline for further research in this context. Design/methodology/approach: The empirical part of the research conducted has been targeted with an abductive, qualitative, multiple case study approach. The need for this research has been identified through an in-depth and iterative literature review and the methodology chosen, i.e. multiple case study research, has been justified. The empirical part to contribute to closing the research gap has thereby been divided into four parts: 1. Preparation of research and pilot 2. Case studies and result documentation 3. Analysis, interpretation and consensus construction development 4. Conclusions, limitations, outlook and recommendations Findings: The findings represent a significant contribution both for knowledge as well as business practice. In addition to the identification of further gaps in research, the literature review thereby isolated a specific need with regards to understanding and improving factors affecting service technicians in stationary equipment corrective maintenance response time. In this con-text, numerous concepts, such as PSS, servitization, competitive objectives/priorities, correc-tive maintenance, response time reduction, etc. have been reviewed, put into context, dis-played in a structured way and contributed to by this research. Furthermore, a set of 57 per-ceived factors influencing the corrective maintenance process and 87 perceived improvement opportunities has been identified. The consensus construction structures and prioritizes these, gives action recommendations and makes the findings available for application in business practice in the community studied. Last but not least, the research conducted has risen the awareness for the importance of this topic