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Collaboration and service partnerships
to drive new levels of operational efficiency

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Markets are evolving rapidly and companies must adapt to thrive in a changing industry environment.

The future of industry is a complex ecosystem involving collaborative networks of partners, assets, expertise and technologies. The companies that gain the greatest competitive advantage from Industry 4.0 will be those willing to embrace new business models and methods of collaboration.

Businesses must make smart choices across the business value chain, deploying the right solutions for the right challenges, at the right times. Decision makers must shift their focus from product to value and approach OpEx with a goal of investing in outcomes, rather than purchasing discrete services. This necessitates collaborating closely with trustworthy partners – sharing goals, expertise, needs and risks. Choosing the ideal service partners is integral to achieving business objectives.

Subscription and other emerging service models can play a key role in outcomes-based customer-service vendor partnerships. At the pinnacle of service agreement evolution is the concept of everything/anything-as-a-Service (XaaS), wherein vendors deliver products, services or other capabilities to customers without the customer needing to purchase permanent ownership of the enabling hardware and software.

Long-term service agreements, such as ABB’s Power Care, provide a single point of contact for asset assessments, preventive maintenance, upgrades and other service needs. ABB Electrification Service supports customers to develop future-focused service strategies, optimizing electrical equipment value across the entire asset life cycle.

This collaborative approach was seen when ABB partnered with one of South America’s largest and oldest banks. The bank operates a world-class modern data center at its headquarters, which relies on a complex network of circuit breakers, switchboards and drives – but the bank had no preventive maintenance contract for these power components.

When the bank experienced problems with its power equipment, it led to costly shutdowns of the data center. The bank’s engineering team contacted ABB to help understand what had been happening and to explore the value of a maintenance contract.

The preventive maintenance process included steps to:

increase the lifecycle of equipment
reduce failures and problems
anticipate any dangerous situation where customers could be exposed to electrical equipment or where operations might be interrupted.

Beyond maintaining the equipment, ABB provided training for all technical employees in maintenance techniques and developed retrofit kits for the old panels to improve the reliability of the overall electrical system. To reinforce the training, ABB’s technical team conducted conference calls with the bank’s information technology team, analyzing data from the center to understand how to predict potential new failures before they happen.

Since implementing the preventive maintenance contract with the bank, downtime for the data center has been reduced to zero, with no failures. The center has not needed to shut down for either power problems or the maintenance process itself. Data losses from power outages have ended, reliability has increased and confidence in its performance has improved.

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