A paperless office is not only environmentally friendly but also advantageous in many aspects. The digitalisation of documents and corresponding processes saves time, reduces mistakes and therefore realizes cost savings for companies. This time can be invested in better customer management. Real estate companies work with thousands of rented apartments and as many customers and thus have to maintain and manage a lot of customer related data. IT has already created manifold remedies with Enterprise-Resource-Planning (ERP) and CustomerRelationship-Management (CRM) systems and models, but there is still plenty of development potential to be exploited by integrating mobile solutions into the IT architecture. The main challenge thereby is not the programming of an app but the seamless integration into customer processes and the creation of customer acceptance and thus value. Therefore, it is investigated how mobile applications can better control customer processes and whether such an implementation is profitable. For this purpose, typical work and customer processes of real estate companies must be analysed, understood and transferred to appropriate mobile solutions. This paper examines the details which need to be considered in such projects.
The internet of things, digital twins of smart connected products, and thereby enabled smart services are topics of great interest and have been gaining traction for many years. However, many questions concerning the application-oriented usage of digital twins still need to be scrutinized. Therefore, this paper examines the question of an application-oriented framework for value creation with digital twins using design science research approaches. A conceptual reference framework is presented based on earlier research and iteratively developed within workshops with three companies. The framework incorporates primary dimensions of external and internal value creation and data resources. Further, it discusses the product life cycle, the real-world counterpart, value creation in the ecosystem, and the generational aspect of the digital twins. Furthermore, applying the framework to a use case with an industrial research partner helps to show the contributions to the industrial sector. The framework provides utility to practitioners as a means of creating a common sense in interdisciplinary teams, communicating digital twin projects to internal and external stakeholders, and as a toolbox for specific challenges concerning digital twins. In addition, the framework distinguishes itself from existing approaches by including the service ecosystem and its actors while considering the principles of product life cycle management. Therefore, using the framework in other use cases will test the approach on different industries and products. Furthermore, there is a need to develop approaches for implementing and developing an existing case.
As digital twin configurations depend on their use case, there is a need for research on how companies can select the capabilities and appropriate level of sophistication to deploy digital twins in practice successfully. This study investigated the properties and characteristics of digital twins described in academic literature. It summarized them in a taxonomy, which was subsequently used to code and examine 90 definitions of companies. For the analysis, both supervised and unsupervised methods were applied. The results show that researchers focus more on technological requirements when defining digital twins, while companies use more value-based properties that are not included or not precisely delineated in academic reviews. Therefore, an application-oriented definition is proposed to bridge this gap and complement the taxonomy. This study thus contributes to the discussion and forming of an application-oriented and shared understanding of the digital twin concept in research and practice.
The nascent technology of smart dust -miniaturized sensor networks -promises high value to advance industrial product-service-systems. While previous studies have identified smart dust as source for product and service innovation, the pathways from an initial offering to smart dust-enhanced productservice-systems have received scant attention. The present work in the scope of a Swiss National Science Foundation project on the economic potentials of this technology aims to conceptualize and apply strategies for smart dust-enhanced product-service-systems. This conceptual research resulted in the three pathways (1) product-driven strategy, (2) service-driven strategy and (3) holistic strategy which could be successfully mapped to the use case "Monitoring of structures". In closing, this emerging technology helps to make industrial product-servicesystems more customer-and user-oriented as called by recent voices. To science, we introduce smart dust in the field of product-service-systems and offer a first systemization of pathways, thus contribute to the product-service-systems engineering knowledge base. To practice, we provide useful approaches to be applied at a strategy level to push the servitization in manufacturing forward.
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