Collaboration between Service and R&D Organizations – Two Cases in Automation Industry

Industrial automation systems are long-lasting multitechnological systems that need industrial services in order to keep the system up-to-date and running smoothly. The Serviceorganization needs to jointly work internally with R&D and externally with customers and COTS providers so as to operateefficiently. This paper focuses to Service – R&D collaboration. It presents a descriptive case study of how the working relationship between Service and R&D organizations has been established ina two example industrial service cases (upgrade and audit cases). The article reports the collaboration practices and tools that havebeen defined for these industrial services. This research provides, for other companies and research institutes that work withindustrial companies, practical real-life cases of how Service and R&D organizations collaborate together. Other companies wouldbenefit from studying the contents of the cases presented in this article and applying these practices in their particular context,where applicable

Keywords:

Automation systems , Industrial service , Lifecycle , Transparency , Collaboration