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by   | Abstract: | EAM vendors set their sights on helping manage the delivery of services -- whether it be inside an organization or external. |
Equipment maintenance is tough work -- it's dirty, tedious and people-intensive (i.e., expensive). So it's no surprise many manufacturers have elected to focus on core competencies and outsource their maintenance work to service providers (SP), who promise to do the job better and at a lower cost. Often, the SPs are the same OEMs that manufactured that equipment in the first place. "Maintenance is not something most manufacturers care to do. Very few young employees want to learn how to do maintenance," says Steve Roth, vice president of marketing for Indus International Inc. (Atlanta), an enterprise asset management (EAM) vendor. "As the older workers retire and the knowledge goes with them, companies are struggling with how to maintain the assets." Outsourcing promises to reduce the hassles and decrease the costs. It's not hard to see why so many manufacturers are handing off asset maintenance and management. One effect of this trend -- going on for the past year or two -- has been the transformation of the enterprise asset management software space. Vendors of the popular EAM suites have evolved (or are in the process of evolving) their offerings to take a service management perspective. Indus, for example, has altered its focus to concentrate on what it calls "service delivery management" (SDM). [Click to continue] |