CRAFT Co-operative Research
Proposal number: COOP-CT-2003-508637
Start Date: 1 February 2004, End Date: 31 January 2006

SMEs offering already products with Ambient Intelligence (AmI) elements, intend in a near future (next 1-2 years) to introduce new and/or improve their current products with even more AmI features seeing this as their crucial competitive edge. For such products they need a sophisticated support system. The business objective to be achieved within the FOKSai project is to provide a comprehensive solution of the support to extended products from the ambient intelligence domain, which will be affordable for the SMEs manufacturers (such a solution has to considerably enhance SME business performance by assuring higher acceptance of AmI-products by the customers, reduction of the time and costs needed for customer support (product maintenance, solving customer problems etc.).

Four industrial SMEs having the common needs of extending their AmI-products by product and customer support system have entered the consortium to launch with three RTD partners the project to develop:

• A methodology for extensions of AmI-products which will strongly observe business and organisational issues relevant for SMEs
• A knowledge based system to support extended AmI-products, which will be affordable for the SMEs manufacturers,
  

The intention is to make this solution general enough to be used for different products and scalable to support the future AmI-products in order to achieve a product (methodology and KM system) which can be offered to a wide spectrum of SMEs intending to introduce AmI-products in their production plans.

The customer and product support to be developed will be demonstrated as pilot installations within the environments of 4 SMEs.