potential

For many companies from the investment goods industry industrial services have evolved from a necessary prerequisite for selling a core product to a very important source of turnover and profit. But what role do industrial services play for the providing company during an economical crisis? To answer this question, the authors conducted interviews with six Swiss companies from machining and plant industry. The results of the research especially highlight the unique economic potential of industrial services. Companies may use the highlighted potential by adapting their service offering according to their customer’s economic situation.

For already cooperating businesses, a question that often occurs is: which potential cooperation activities under the given conditions can be developed and how can they be evaluated? To the authors’ knowledge, there is no structured and validated procedure for the identification and evaluation of existing cooperation potentials. This usually occurs through a subjective assessment by cooperation experts and is highly dependent on the experience of the persons involved. Therefore a method is presented which makes a structured and valid identification of cooperation potentials in existing inter-company relations possible.

Modern factories are heavily influenced by product technologies, processes, IT tools and by the behaviour of the markets. Therefore these factories have to change accordingly using new tools and technologies. As such, Augmented Reality (AR) is a new and promising technology to support different tasks within the factories. The large economic potential of the AR technology is verified through different applications and justifies the efforts for further hardware and software development.