Autor: Axel Friedewald

The paper describes a modular, AR-based assistance system that guides the user through a maintenance task by displaying components and meta-information step by step. By supplementing a learning success control, the system can also be used for continuing education of service technicians and operating personnel. Special emphasis was placed on an integrated information system that allows maintenance information and training tasks to be created with little effort and at the same learning and work tasks to be teached on the systems used in practice.

Due to the high competition on the world market, companies look for unique characteristics for their products. One opportunity is to establish a closer relationship to the customer by giving him the possibility to make last-minute change requests. This approach provides a possibility to discuss such a request at a great distance via Augmented Reality. The objective is to evaluate its feasibility and its costs on short notice and in cooperation with the customer.

The one-of-a-kind production often is characterized by a high share in manual work. Information gathering requires an essential percentage of the workers time. The article shows as Augmented Reality can help to reduce the efforts of information gathering and to increase productivity.

Highly valuable goods are usually customized to the specific needs of the customer. It is therefore essential to integrate the customer in the important decisions during the engineering phase. This article introduces a Augmented Reality solution to design and plan variants on-site together with the customer. This solution was tested on a real example, a retrofit of an emission reducing technology on a ship.

Technologies such as Digital Mock Up (DMU) or Virtual Reality (VR) help to expose and fix design errors at an early stage in the product development process. Nevertheless the discovery of these potential problems is still a common obstacle. The approach introduced within this paper improves the existing virtual product validation method by using the company’s existing knowledge of former projects. The DMU-Cockpit integrates the usually spread experience of known errors in one tool by modelling a relation between classified components and sources of error in a matrix. This allows the automatic selection of potential sources of error for a chosen part and derives the most valuable validation tasks of the knowledge base.

Fabrication and assembly processes - in which the manual work processes play an important role related to a high probability of errors and interruptions - can be planned with the production simulation, if the simulation approach is adapted to the robust planning method. This article shows for the example of shipbuilding, how the simulation user benefits from the scenario-based process model for the preparation and management of the simulation scenarios. Additionally a systematic evaluation method simplifies the interpretation of the simulation results in order to assess the robustness of the planning alternatives.

Competence in building more innovative ships will help the German Maritime Industry guaranteeing its existence under competitive conditions in respect to Asia. The realistic visualisation with Virtual Reality (VR) enables the demonstration of the shipyard’s design competence to the customer in an early stage as well as the discussion of design decisions and their implications between ship yard and supplier. Using the example of shipbuilding, the article shows which changes in the business processes of a company are essential for an efficient use of VR and which add-ons are necessary for a user-oriented ease of operation.

industrial enterprises to permanently develop new strategies to differentiate themselves from their competitors. Besides product innovations, services complementing these products are increasingly used for differentiation purposes. But only the right combination of different services forming a service portfolio allows successful service offering. Therefore, a systematic engineering approach is required to compose a service portfolio that fits to a company’s potentials as well as to customer requirements. However, until today this aspect of service engineering is not continuously and systematically supported.

Increasing international competition forces German companies to enhance their portfolio of products and services. Facing this strategic decision, the required competencies for successful market positioning have to be analyzed. Such target-oriented investments in competencies of the employees allow companies to gain an outstanding competitive position. Best practice examinations have proven a positive relation between competence investments on the one hand and market attractiveness of products and services as well as employment situation on the other hand. Yet today, there is a lack of systematic and continuous controlling of competence development processes on a strategic level.

Unlike common opinion the efficiency of product development projects can be increased by the application of workflow-management-systems. The basis for this provides a reference model for workflow-supported product development which classifies the required workflow types and software tools for the different tasks in the project. For the frequent case of a change management process it will be shown how different variants of this process can be configured through workflow modules and which interdependencies between workflow and project management system occur.