Rock Crusher Upgrade Business from a PLM Perspective

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.