Business Models

This article presents examples of mobile B2B applications. Mobile B2B solutions are often seen as an advancement to their well known stationary counterparts in the internet. Their deployment shall lead to a formidable reduction of costs. Despite this advantage there exist only few examples of successful B2B solutions. Technical restrictions of the mobile clients still prevent their wider diffusion.

Using case studies, this article describes the business impact that Ubiquitous Computing could have on future organisations. Not only human beings but also products want to communicate a specific image. The article shows how this will affect future business processes. The product becomes the agent of the producer and communicates with its environment in order to comply with the performance objectives given by the producer. By using Ubiquitous Computing, possible future product functions will outperform the current industrial communication design by far.

After looking at the current market situation for mobile devices, a system architecture for mobile operation sys-tems is being introduced. The systematic segmentation of Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) and the development of an evaluation scheme enable a detailed and consis-tent market analysis.

Collaborative Engineering offers companies new possibilities to involve their suppliers into the product development process. The requirements which a successful approach for internet-supported supplier integration has to fulfil are exemplified for the ship building industry. Flexibility and low implementation effort of the chosen solution turn out to be, together with appropriate functionalities to support the distributed cooperation, decisive success factors.

Business relation between customer and supplier is less characterized by purchase of investment goods. In terms of specific use tasks the functional utility of investment goods becomes of higher weight shortly. Within the new business relationship supplier becomes full-service-supplier and cus-tomer becomes user, as flexibility and availability are increasing. The definition contracting model used in plant engineering and construction describes the change from purchasing and property to acquisition by use. Due to the fact that it is a complex term, realizable types and physical forms of contracting models are presented below. Based on this, first experiences with contracting models are presented, future significance of contracting models is calculated, possible short-ages are identified as well as the need to act which hinder an implementation of contracting models yet.

The majority of manufacturing enterprises is currently trying to become more competitive in the preparation of customer-centric and innovative products. The focus of manufacturing paradigm is changing from a mainly sales-driven business towards a provider of utility or benefit to the customer. Consequently, the traditional product definition must be extended. Based on the description of the concept of extended products, this paper discusses approaches to extend the classical product definition and the resulting requirements. Additionally, the role of collaboration in enterprise networks will be discussed. Some practical examples are mentioned.

Innovations are significant corporate challenges - and this is particularly the case with companies offering services. This article offers up to date results of an ongoing research project. It describes in detail a case of the way of a medium-sized company from a producer to service leadership, from the ini-tial situation via central challenges up to the current approach of a corporate university as engine and enabling context for permanent innovating of services.

Customer Service as an add-on for products is accepted as an important factor for international competition. It is also very often established as a business unit. In the following article not only problems are discussed for pricing and costing in customer service, but also methods for solving these problems are pointed out, how to appropriately calculate costs according to the input involved as basis for customer oriented pricing.

Performance contracting changes the way of cooperation between customer and supplier substantially and turns a former product business into a service business. Both from supplier’s and customer’s point of view several reasons exist why to adopt contracting solutions. The actual market adoption, however, is still moderate. After the introduction of the peculiarities of performance contracting, this paper deals with the causes of market resistance and the most important barriers of launching the respective solutions. Based on empirical observations proposals are developed in order to overcome the resistance.

This article analyzes how and to which extent ERP application modules are supported by the use of mobile technology. Features provided by ERP vendors and real-world solutions using mobile applications are presented. We discuss how the utility of ERP systems can be en-hanced through mobile components. Our investigation shows that most mobile business applications are found in the modules sales and customer service. On the other hand, ERP areas like finance, accounting and controlling do not yet exploit the potential of mobile technology significantly.