Mobile Virtual Work A New Paradigm phần 10 pdf

15 Mobile Workplaces and Innovative Business Practice 353

product manufacturer’s de-structuring and concentrating on core compe￾tencies.

Mobile technologies for the automotive industry

This situation has important implications for the automotive product de￾sign and engineering process. As product costs are incurred in all stages of

the life cycle, including maintenance, product development must more and

more be dealt with in terms of life cycle and total ownership cost. Time to

market has become an important competitive factor. Overall, the complex￾ity of the product and of its handling has enormously increased compared

to a few years ago. To cope with this situation, the organisation of the

product development process is changing. To be able to handle the holistic

view of the product development process and the geographic dispersion of

actors involved, companies are experimenting with distributed forms of the

design and engineering process. This has various organisational implica￾tions. There is an increasing need to support ad-hoc collaboration proc￾esses such as unplanned meetings. Also, more robust control and supervi￾sion systems with corresponding workspaces will be necessary to

coordinate multi-location working and to adapt assembly lines to changing

customer needs and car usage information. Additionally, as innovation cuts

across the product life cycle, adequate inter-related workspaces for each

type of engineering activity are becoming a necessity.

As regards to mobile collaborative working, it can be foreseen that

multi-location distributed forms of work organisation will be important to

support collaborative product development tasks. Mobile technologies will

allow the team members to join such collaborative product development

activities at anytime from anywhere, offering greater work flexibility. Fur￾thermore, organisations can improve the efficiency of their production

processes by using smart electronic tags to support better logistics within

the supply chain. Mobile technologies will be of high importance in sup￾porting business processes such as remote field service e.g. remote car di￾agnosis, maintenance and repair, and road assistance, in relations man￾agement and sales, and in management and coordination.

15.4.2 Aerospace industry

The aerospace industry is under pressure from their customers to produce

better quality, safer and cheaper products in ever-shorter periods. To meet

these targets, similar to the automotive industry, the aerospace industry has

embraced the concurrent engineering (CE) principles within their product

354 Hans Schaffers et al.

life cycle. A CE approach encourages developers to consider all aspects of

the product’s life cycle from its conception through to disposal, including

user requirements, cost, quality and maintenance. Parallel development of

products may reduce considerably the time required for product develop￾ment. CE promotes the introduction of specialist knowledge from the

downstream product life cycle stages during design. By addressing issues

such as manufacturing, assembly and maintenance in early stages, CE aims

to reduce unforeseen problems creeping into the design as it progresses

through its life cycle. Consequently, CE can save both time and money

while improving product quality.

The aerospace industry consists of truly distributed virtual organisations

that have complex characteristics compared to other sectors. Such charac￾teristics include number of partners, i.e. the Airbus network, complexity of

the product, i.e. number of components and related disciplines, size of the

organisation including equipment manufacturers, risk-sharing partners,

suppliers and sub-contractors, long lead times, and huge capital needs for

developing products. For example, Airbus has about 150 sites throughout

the world with distributed manufacturing facilities in France, Germany,

UK and Spain. It works with an international network of about 1,500 sup￾pliers in more than 30 countries. As a result, this sector needs efficient col￾laborative tools and processes to work as a distributed virtual organisation.

In the past years, the aerospace industry has moved from a discipline￾based organisation (based on the different departments within a design of￾fice) to a process- or program-based organisation. As a result, people from

several design office disciplines are gathered in co-located platforms (the

product integrated teams) together with representatives from manufactur￾ing and support engineering, during the product development phase. In the

future, due to the need of higher responsiveness to market demands and to

reach another significant step in term of costs, cycle time and quality, a

more agile and adaptive organisation is expected. In this organisation the

engineering process will be distributed among a variety of knowledge

teams in a network or “mesh-like” structure.

Mobile technologies for the aerospace sector

The drive for concurrent engineering and reduced product lead times has

lead to the development of secure shared working environments connect￾ing the project partners, supply chain and the customer. The challenge is

that it is still difficult to truly collaborate in a virtual environment and

many design engineers still travel to take advantage of the rich communi￾cation environment offered by face-to-face meetings. This means the re￾quirements for mobile working are even greater.

15 Mobile Workplaces and Innovative Business Practice 355

A significant step towards remote or mobile working has been the use of

digital mock-ups (DMUs). This has made a dramatic difference to the abil￾ity of project stakeholders to have access to and visibility of the required

data and information. DMUs allow sharing of, for example, product break

down structures and visibility of conflicts highlighted by geometries. This

has meant shared decision making, better impact assessment as well as

more accurate design for assembly and maintenance. The next steps are to

allow sharing and brokering of analysis tools, access to product data man￾agement systems, and the use of ontologies to allow the exchange of mean￾ingful information from databases. As in the automotive industry, mobile

technologies can be used to support the design phase and the production

phase, allowing greater work flexibility and better logistics. Similarly,

smart electronic devices can be used to monitor the performance of aero￾engines and support predictive maintenance of aircrafts, saving millions of

Euros for companies.

15.4.3 Building and construction industry

The building and construction industry is known to change at a very slow

pace with little investment in ICT to enhance their work processes. In the

building and construction process many partners play a role and it has a

fragmented nature. The project organisation is created for each project.

This means that in most cases different experts such as designers don’t

know each other and have not yet worked together when the project starts.

The operating environment is a building site with no permanent infrastruc￾ture or factory-like services.

The traditional procurement mode is based on minimizing capital costs

instead of optimizing performance. This gives little incentives for product

or process innovation. There are some new contracting models in use ex￾tending the suppliers’ responsibility and interest towards the long service

life of buildings. Until now the main contractors have mainly been respon￾sible to deliver the facility with a very short guarantee period, a year or

two. In the future, if the main supplier e.g. contractor is ready to take the

responsibility of operating and maintaining the building for the coming

decades, it will certainly lead to organisational changes and new service

concepts based on value networks.

Given the rapidly changing market environment, higher demands of as￾set managers and conscious users, single suppliers cannot provide the re￾quested whole life performance and services alone in a sustainable way.

The mistrust between client and supplier needs to be transformed into

partnerships. The sub-optimized management of a changing chain of cheap

356 Hans Schaffers et al.

subcontractors or suppliers and project based profit maximization must be

developed to a value network providing sustainable business opportunities

for those who are both willing and capable to improve their performance.

In short, the transition from today’s lose-lose business model to a win-win

one is highly desirable.

The open market and the growth of the Community, combined with the

unstable local markets, require the industry to seek international work and

collaboration. Most of the key players in the national markets are already

involved in international activities. These activities are either based on

subsidiaries or strategic partnerships. Many of the companies are not

trained in international collaboration and the management are neither

structured nor complemented to address the challenges.

Mobile technologies for the building and construction industry

Similar to the automotive and the aerospace industries, the building and

construction sector needs to bring together large number of geographically

dispersed partners to design, construct and maintain a building. The use of

mobile technology during the design phase could allow partners to interact

with each other in a much more flexible way to work more efficiently.

Some examples of the use of mobile technology during the construction

phase include access to design data to clarify construction tasks, safety

monitoring of workers and the use of smart electronic tags to support lo￾gistics and resource monitoring. The construction sector is also exploring

the benefits of using mobile technology in the service phase of the build￾ing. Typical mobile force applications in the construction industry do

equip the engineer with a mobile device, which is linked to the central dis￾patch and data system of the company. The mobile application can support

the engineer in a multitude of processes which makes them independent

from a physical office and offers the remote field worker total mobility.

These applications are now in their initial stages in medium and large en￾terprises in the construction industry. The impact on costs becomes clearly

visible, when we think of the number of remote engineers and the volume

of the installed base, i.e. the number of sites to be served. For example, for

a medium sized company in Switzerland, which was monitoring heating

systems in 200.000 sites using more than 250 technicians, the introduction

of such a solution decreased administration cost by 70%. In the future, ser￾vices like elevators, heating systems and security systems can be equipped

with mobile technologies for ongoing communication with central surveil￾lance systems, ensuring continuous controlling and monitoring and data

availability for maintenance and security. Although the industry has started

in the mid nineties to centralize the development and standardization of e-