USE-IT-WISELY Innovative continuous upgrades of high investment product-services

Innovative continuous upgrades of high investment product-services

Summary

In the past, customers invested in high cost, long service-life products. Today, they demand complex product-services capable of adapting to new customer goals and rapidly changing markets. The Use-it-wisely project will enable European manufacturers to operate successfully within this new paradigm. The project will investigate a new business model that implements continuous product-service adaptation through a sequence of small innovative steps. It will demonstrate that product-service agility and extended service life realized in this way is more viable than large and infrequent upgrades in terms of cost, duration and environmental impact. Use-it-wisely will develop and demonstrate the adaptation platform consisting of the following three elements: (1) multi-disciplinary actors-product-service system model; (2) adaptation mechanism based on the knowledge and skills of all actors involved with the system; (3) interactive collaborative distributed environment, where the actors work out the adaptation steps. The scientific breakthrough will be achieved by creating and validating a holistic systems engineering structure that combines human-machine systems, product lifecycle management, business and organizational dynamics and lifecycle assessment. The industry-led consortium is founded on complementary clusters in six key industry sectors: energy, machinery, space, office workplace, vehicles, and ship building. Use-it-wisely will enable new business for the manufacturers and their suppliers, subcontractors and open new opportunities for the customers. It will increase their competitive advantage by means of product-service agility, lower costs, shorter lead times, and reduced environmental impact. Finally, it will help to transform people’s knowledge and skills into product-service value thus strengthening Europe’s global competitiveness and securing domestic employment. With Use-it-wisely, the more the product-service is used, the better it gets.

More information

Duration:	39 months
Start date:	01-09-2013
End date:	30-11-2016
Number of participants:	20
Total budget - EC contribution:	8592106 Euro - 6440000 Euro
Call topic:	Innovative design of personalised product-services and of their production processes based on collaborative environments (FoF.NMP.2013-5)
Instrument:	Large-scale integrating project