| In a very broad sense field service can be defined as “service provided to people and/or their possessions, located at a customer's site”. This definition is broad enough to include such diverse activities as: fire, police and ambulance operations; pick-up and delivery operations; and the after-sales support of purchased equipment. In today's electronic world, field service may include the traditional practice of personnel, vehicles, and equipment traveling to the customer's location, or it may be accomplished through various forms of remote communication. The goal of this thesis is to provide a better understanding of field service in general and to examine ways in which managers specifically engaged in after-sales support might be able to improve the effectiveness of their field service operations. This thesis fills gaps in the current literature by providing: (1) a new framework for understanding and analyzing field service, based on a classification model that defines field service activities by their position on a two-dimensional graph contrasting delay costs and degree of uncertainty; (2) a case study of a real-world firm providing field service, which highlights the complexity of field service operations in the real world; (3) a discussion of the appropriate dimensions and measurements of field service flexibility; (4) the development of a model and a corresponding simulation experiment to study the tradeoffs involved in employing dedicated vs. flexible servers.; The model developed here characterizes a field service environment as a simple queuing system with two types of arrivals and two types of servers, where the servers might be dedicated to specific machines, or flexible in the sense of being able to service more than one type of machine. Graphical results of the simulation imply that a small proportion of server flexibility is usually sufficient to minimize total service and delay costs. This conclusion is consistent with similar studies done in manufacturing environments.; The thesis points out several conceptual problems in field service that need attention and could be potential subjects for a concentrated research effort. In addition, suggested ways of extending the current research by expanding or redefining the parameters are offered. |
