Analytics4Innovation

Through the development of data based services, traditional companies from the engineering sector receive the chance to extend their product portfolio and to differentiate themselves from market competitors. However, the high cost pressure, insufficient IT-knowledge and the merging of industry boundaries in the engineering sector complicate the development of digital service offerings. While more and more companies from other industries, such as Amazon or Alibaba, offer technological services for their clients, especially small and medium-sized enterprises fall behind in the development of innovative after-sales services. Even though the established engineering companies already have access to a multitude of information about customers, this information is not used today for the development of data-based value-added offers in after-sales.

The project examined the issue of which and how SMEs can use business analytics tools to develop new services to strengthen their service portfolio and competitiveness. For this purpose, suitable data sources and business analytics tools are identified (for example machine data of the installed base, log files, service data, etc.) and compared with the process models of service engineering. It will also research which data analysis tools can be implemented with little effort by SMEs to provide new services from the available data. Practicality is demonstrated by field trials with SMEs.