Supportability and purchasing decisions for capital assets: Positioning paper

Acquisition decisions for capital assets have a titanic impact on the operational costs of capital-intensive organizations. After the acquisition process, the cost of ownership is tied to the design characteristics of the assets, which dictate how they are operated and maintained. This reflects the importance of the prominent role of maintenance in the asset acquisition process, creating an optimal balance between suppliers, owners and maintainers. To provide this balance, the maintenance organization can use supportability analysis to assess design and measure its impact on the support organization. The analysis will highlight the design attributes of an asset that create critical demand for support resources. The resources will be necessary in order to sustain operational capability. In this work, we review existing literature for the purchasing of capital assets and supportability analysis methods. To understand the drivers of demand for support resources we conducted field studies of asset downtime using examples of trains that operate within The Netherlands. We further motivate research and provide our research agenda.