Rock Crusher Upgrade Business from a PLM Perspective

Abstract

Global trends of ecology and sustainable development, safety awareness, changing legislation, and urbanization, together with the economic situation, force industry to find solutions for extending product lifecycles, while maintaining and improving machine system performance and other properties during the lifecycles. Together with these societal issues, firms are struggling with competitiveness. This chapter introduces the new Use-it-Wisely (UIW) approach to upgrading rock crushers at customer sites. The higher level problem needing to be solved concerned making upgrade delivery projects profitable and more desirable for customers, manufacturing OEMs and suppliers. The main recognized and treated bottlenecks were related to knowing the actual status of the upgrade target, communication and collaboration with stakeholders, verification and validation of upgrade specifications and an efficient information flow between the stakeholders. Augmented reality (AR), Virtual environments (VE), camera based 3D scanning, and cloud based solutions are the selected pieces of technology for solving the bottlenecks. They enable better communication, collaboration and involvement of all stakeholders, including customers, internal stakeholders, suppliers and partners. They also better enable the planning and discussing of service quality activities. Product life-cycle management (PLM) is the framework for developing and managing product related information, processes and collaboration expanding towards product middle-of-life, end-of-life, and service lifecycle management. This study is a proof-of-concept that demonstrates the potential of contributions to business model innovations and game changes for upgrading business.

Business Model Research on Industrial Augmented Reality: A Systematic Literature Review on the Current State and Future Research Areas

“…In the work of Leino et al [48], a proof-of-concept is presented to demonstrate the potential of using AR to innovate the Upgrading BM of a rock crusher manufacturer. The purpose is to answer questions on how to make the rock crushing machine upgrade business profitable, how to establish a successful BM, and how to effectively manage such upgrade projects using AR.…”

“…The results show that the use of AR improves productivity due to a more fluent flow of information. In addition, AR enables virtual testing of proposed solutions before building physical products, as well as better planning and discussion of service activities [48].…”

“…In this step, 42 publications were excluded as they were either exclusively or mainly related to AR applications in non-industrial sectors such as tourism, education, sports, gaming, healthcare, retail. As a result, a total of only six publications were identified that met all three inclusion criteria [11,12,[48][49][50][51].…”

“…Only two research papers report on the use of primary data collection methods. Leino et al [48] use questionnaires and interviews as data collection methods to evaluate the use of AR for the rock crushing machine upgrade business. Based on a swim-lane process diagram, the authors of [48] also apply a walk-through method in a focus group session to evaluate the newly proposed BM.…”

“…Leino et al [48] investigate a single and very specific IAR application. A manufacturer of rock crushers that provides machine upgrade solutions is considering the use of AR to visualize the upgrade solution to its customers and to support field workers in assembling the upgrade solution by overlaying the virtual solution on top of the old machine.…”