Voice-enabled assistants, such as Alexa and Google Assistant, are among the fastest-growing information technology applications. Their technological foundation matured over the last years and reached a point where new application areas in challenging business environments become a certainty. Maintenance in manufacturing is one of these areas. This paper presents expectations, requirements, and a concept for a voice-enabled digital intelligent assistant that supports maintenance activities. We identified process monitoring, task execution, reporting, problem-solving, and maintenance planning as the key functional modules for an assistant. Realizing them depends on basic, utility, and maintenance functions. Our discussion states that all fundamental technologies and tools to realize an assistant for maintenance exist, but they have constraints. For instance, Speech-to-Text mechanisms lack transparent and performant solutions, and natural language understanding must rely on small datasets, which is challenging. We argue that continuous improvement and systematic evaluation of an assistant prototype is important to create high-quality training data. Trial-and-error is common because some technologies still mature, and conversation designers lack design patterns for the maintenance domain. Challenges for system adoption include providing an outstanding user experience, handling factory-specific jargon, and the limited availability of easy-to-use data exchange interfaces for machines and business applications. We conclude that further efforts on interoperability, technology stack management, AI-focused change management, and education programs are necessary. Furthermore, the accountability of AI systems is a cost factor for the assistant’s service providers and the client companies in manufacturing – AI insurance services, human-in-the-loop functions, user training, and professional education are actions to address this issue. ... Read more

A product’s value is increasingly determined by the services supporting it. Complex Product-Service Systems (PSS) – combinations of services and products – are in demand. Product usage information (PUI), that is, information about how an individual product is used, is rapidly becoming a valuable asset to industry to help inform service offers throughout the product lifecycle. Conventionally, information about how a product is used is gathered in customer relations and MRO (maintenance, repair and overhaul) processes via channels such as repair logs, call centres or helpdesks. Today, new channels of PUI are emerging from the digitalization of products, the Internet of Things, Cyber-Physical Systems, Internet PUI sources and social media. However, there is a lack of a methodological approach which companies use to select the right PUI source for the design of services, and vice-versa, to understand which value-added services can be offered using information already generated by sensors embedded into their products or available on the Internet or in social media. This contribution is intended to show an avenue of research towards such a methodology. ... Read more