On-chain global maintenance services: technical, legal and managerial implications

Facility management deals with all activities that are not core business for a company and are consequently outsourced to specialized companies. Maintenance is a fundamental activity in facility management and it is often handled by Global Maintenance Services (GMS) where some maintenance activities are delegated by the company to service providers and are remu- nerated according to measurable results expressed as Key Performance Indicators. In this context, it would be desirable to have information sys- tems trustable by all involved actors. In this paper, we discuss the design of a blockchain solution capable to support a GMS on-chain. We first introduce the GMS concept and how it is related to the Principal-Agent relationship, and then we show a reference architecture to implement GMS on-chain. We discuss a use case and a proof-of-concept of on-chain GMS in a hospital showing how smart contracts and oracles can be used in this context. We finally discuss the main legal and managerial implications of the proposed approach.