Abstract
In the complex PC-based industry, the competitiveness among high-tech companies is increasingly intensive. Meanwhile, the profit margin of hardware is on the decline. Brand companies have transformed to be service-oriented solution providers. Given the limited resources for product service design center, how to align with the company business strategies and maintain customer satisfaction through developing the appropriate portfolio and configurations of service parts has become an important issue for the global service management team of PC companies. To fill the gap, this research aims to develop an effective approach based on UNISON decision analysis framework with analytic hierarchy process (AHP) that involves performing in-depth interviews with domain experts to extract their knowledge for service management,analyzing the relative weights of the international factors and considered attributes for market requirements to derive the recommended weight of each index. In particular, three fundamental objectives,namely "compliance to engineering design requirements", "balance the quantity of service parts definition on FRU/CRU “, and "simplify repairing procedures" are derived and transformed into an objective hierarchy. The above mentioned approach is applied to analyze motherboard sub-assembly and LCD panel sub-assembly, historically the key parts with the highest repair rate among the 47 categories of notebook computer service parts. Three alternative solutions are proposed as the alternative designs of these two sub-assemblies, high modularization, low modularization,and medium modularization.The high modularization solution is found to be the most appropriate for large business enterprise customers to reach the target of reducing the maintenance cost of the after-sales service based on the AHP weighting methodology..Following UNISON decision analysis framework, an empirical study of the design portfolios of notebook service parts was conducted as part of this investigation and identified the opportunities of maximizing the utilization of the service parts.The results have shown practical viability of the developed approach.