European companies of today are involved in many stages of the product life cycle. There is a trend towards the view of their business as a complex industrial product-service system (IPSS). This trend shifts the business focus from a traditional product oriented one to a function oriented one. With the function in focus, the seller shares the responsibility of for example maintenance of the product with the buyer. As such IPSS has been praised for supporting sustainable practices. This shift in focus also promotes longevity of products and promotes life extending work on the products such as adaptation and upgrades. Staying competitive requires continuous improvement of manufacturing and services to make them more flexible and adaptive to external changes. The adaptation itself needs to be performed efficiently without disrupting ongoing operations and needs to result in an acceptable after state. Virtual planning models are a key technology to enable planning and design of the future operations in parallel with ongoing operations. This chapter presents an approach to combine digitalization and virtual reality (VR) technologies to create the next generation of virtual planning environments. Through incorporating digitalization techniques such as 3D imaging, the models will reach a new level of fidelity and realism which in turn makes them accessible to a broader group of users and stakeholders. Increased accessibility facilitates a collaborative decision making process that invites and includes cross functional teams. Through such involvement, a broader range of experts, their skills, operational and tacit knowledge can be leveraged towards better planning of the upgrade process. This promises to shorten

Automotive manufacturing systems are high investment assets in need of continuous upgrades and changes to remain relevant and effective. The complexity of such a system is reflected in the difficulty of making holistically informed decisions regarding the upgrades and changes. To reach holistic and sound decisions it is important to collaborate between departments, experts, and operational actors during the planning and development of upgrades and changes. Such collaboration should be supported by tools, models, and methods that facilitate understanding and enable the users to express their input and feedback in a clear and understandable manner. This chapter describes the development and evaluation of one set of tools. The developed tools combine 3D imaging and virtual reality technologies to facilitate the creation of decision support models that are accurate, realistic, and intuitive to understand. The developed tools are evaluated by industrial engineers in the area of manufacturing R&D.