July Paper by Chara Makri, on Barriers and Facilitators to Incident Reporting in Servitized Manufacturers.
Barriers and Facilitators to Incident Reporting in Servitized Manufacturers
Chara Makri and Andy Neely
In April 2010, an oil rig owned by Transocean and operated on behalf of BP, exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, resulting in 11 deaths and 17 injuries. According to the Deepwater Horizon final report, the accident, also known as the ‘Deepwater Horizon oil spill’, was the result of various issues and involved multiple organisations, but BP has suffered ‘the bulk of public and political criticism’. Like most system accidents, this failure shares a ‘conceptual sameness’ to other failures in the way it occurred. When carefully studied these similarities can help organisations learn from past mistakes and prevent future failures. This can be achieved with the use of an incident reporting system that helps communicate any lessons learnt from past failures to everyone involved. The Deepwater Horizon disaster, is a good example of the complexity involved in many service contracts today. Multiple independent organisations need to work together to ensure the safe delivery of the service to their customers. If any of the partners fail to complete their tasks the entire system can fail with devastating consequences. With more than one third of large manufacturing firms worldwide turning into services, more research and collaboration between academia and the industry is required in order to promote safety within service networks. To answer this call, the Cambridge Service Alliance team has been working closely with industry to provide more insights for servitized manufacturers operating in complex service networks, where decisions may be taken by one party and actions carried out by another. While data collection is still underway, this working paper provides some initial insights on the barriers and facilitators of incident reporting within a service environment.