Overview of sustainability in service
Service and sustainability are intricately linked. The purpose of a service business is to enact service and maintenance strategies that extend the life of physical assets, eliminate waste or inefficiency from support processes, and reuse underutilized asset components or parts. These service outcomes, enabled by our comprehensive asset-centric approach, are helping companies reduce service costs, while also supporting their core sustainability ambitions.
Increase in asset uptime
Reduce scrap and increase uptime by repairing and refurbishing parts and extending asset lifetimes with predictive maintenance.
Reduction in part inventory
Reduce the use of finite materials by improving parts and planning and repairing and reusing returned parts and assets.
Less time spent on-site
Reduce emissions and energy consumption with remote service, proactive asset maintenance and replacement strategies, and more strategic resource optimization.
Why is sustainability important in the field service industry?
It’s no longer sufficient to have a sustainability tagline. Increasingly, organizations have the regulatory requirement to stand behind it. As part of the EU’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD), organizations must report their environmental footprint, commit to reductions, and begin to adopt circular practices. Similar regulations are likely to appear in North America and other geographies.
Technologies for sustainable service lifecycle management
SLM software
Artificial intelligence
Industrial IoT
Augmented reality
PLM
Sustainability best practices in service
An asset-centric approach enables organizations to optimize service execution and deliver more sustainable outcomes across their installed base, field service operations, and service parts management.
Maintain asset efficiency and performance to extend the asset’s useful life and reduce its energy usage.
Track asset performance degradation and useful remaining life to help inform repair vs. refurbish vs. replace decisions.
Provide closed-loop feedback to R&D to improve the quality and reliability of product designs.
Optimize technician routes to reduce vehicle mileage, fuel consumption, and overall wear and tear.
Equip dispatched technicians with the right parts and information to eliminate unnecessary repeat visits.
Activate remote service and customer self-service models to ensure field dispatch is a last resort.
Reduce the need to procure new parts by matching service demand with parts already in the network.
Gain real-time insights into asset performance and asset service needs to reduce the occurrence of unplanned or emergency part shipments.
Facilitate part return and repair by identifying which parts can be returned and following the correct repair process.
How PTC helps customers deliver more sustainable service