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Purpose The purpose is to describe new business opportunities within the Swedish railway industry and to support the development of business models that corresponds with the needs and requirements of Industry 4.0, here denoted as Service Management 4.0. Design/methodology/approach The study is an in-depth and descriptive case study of the Swedish railway system with specific focus on a railway vehicle maintainer. Public reports, statistics, internal documents, interviews and dialogues forms the basis for the empirical findings. Findings The article describes the complex business environment of the deregulated Swedish railway industry. Main findings are in the form of identified business opportunities and new business model propositions for one of the key actors, a vehicle maintainer. Originality/value The article provides valuable understanding of business strategy development within complex business environments and how maintenance related business models could be developed for reaching Service Management 4.0.

To support the decision-making process in various industrial applications, many companies use knowledge management and Information Retrieval (IR). In an industrial setting, knowledge is extracted from data that is often stored in a semi-structured or unstructured format. As a result, Natural Language Processing (NLP) methods have been applied to a number of IR steps. In this work, we explore how NLP and particularly topic modelling can be used to improve the relevance of spare part retrieval in the context of maintenance services. A proposed methodology extracts topics from short maintenance service reports that also include part replacement data. An intuition behind the proposed methodology is that every topic should represent a specific root cause. Experimental were conducted for an ad-hoc retrieval system of service case descriptions and spare parts. The results have shown that our modification improves a baseline system thus boosting the performance of maintenance service solution recommendation.

Today, many companies struggle with maintenance work established by pre–requisites during installation, start–up and use of plants, systems and machines. In search for improvements in existing maintenance organisations, it is easy to conclude that they look like and is a direct consequence of previous engineering decisions and activities. Maintenance work, however, only exists in the operation phase with weak coupling to what created it. Using an empirical knowledge base, several examples of this narrow view on maintenance is given along with the consequences it results in today. By linking together activities in the establishment life–cycle phase with the operation phase it is shown how an enlarged maintenance function could improve the situation. Using references to the leading actors creating the frontier today it is illustrated where most companies could be tomorrow. The paper hopefully will contribute to how maintenance processes and activities are being designed, set–up and carried out.

The Law 4/2012, on timeshare, long-term holiday product, resale and exchange contracts is dictated by the Government pushed by the need to transpose into our Legal Order Directive 2008/122/CE of January 14, 2009 (Directive 2009). This law repeals law 42/1998, regulating real estate timeshare and makes more flexible contractual arrangements allowed for right to use transfer but maintains the rigidity of timeshare basis as mandatory legal regime of the building. This study aims to analyse a single right of those covered by the Directive and the Law 4/2012 (the timeshare on holiday assets) in its most usual scenario (on real estate) and its legal regime, the study of purchasers´ protection techniques covered in the current legislation and ancillary contracts regime., La Ley 4/2012, de 6 de julio, de contratos de aprovechamiento por turno de bienes de uso turístico, de adquisición de productos vacacionales de larga duración, de reventa y de intercambio y normas tributarias se dicta por el Gobierno empujado por la necesidad de trasponer a nuestro Ordenamiento la Directiva 2008/122/CE de 14 de enero del 2009 (Directiva 2009). La norma deroga la Ley 42/1998, reguladora del derecho real de aprovechamiento por turno de bienes inmuebles y flexibiliza las modalidades contractuales permitidas para la transmisión del derecho de aprovechamiento pero mantiene la rigidez propia del régimen de aprovechamiento por turno como régimen jurídico imperativo del edificio. El presente estudio tiene por objeto el análisis de un único derecho de los regulados por la Directiva y la Ley 4/2012 (el de aprovechamiento por turno sobre bienes de uso turístico) en su modalidad más habitual (la que recae sobre bienes inmuebles), así como su régimen jurídico, el estudio de las técnicas de protección del adquirente reguladas en la normativa vigente y el régimen de los contratos accesorios.

Today, many companies struggle with maintenance work established by pre-requisites during purchasing, installation and start-up of plants, systems and machines. In search for improvements in existing maintenance organizations, it´s easy to conclude that they look like and is a direct consequence of previous engineering decisions and activities. Maintenance is, however, performed in the operation phase with weak coupling to what created it. Using an empirical knowledge base, several examples of this narrow view on maintenance is given along with the consequences it results in today. It is argued, that the increasing need to create and preserve knowledge will be the driver for change and the main contribution to an enlarged and more efficient maintenance function. Improvements are pointed out using references to the leading actors creating the frontier today where most companies could be tomorrow. The paper hopefully will contribute to how maintenance processes and activities are being designed, set-up and carried out.