Investigations on Augmented Reality based maintenance practices within SMEs

Maintenance services provided by Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) play a fundamental role in industrial asset management. The vast majority of OEMs provide maintenance services to their customers, as most customers now outsource complex maintenance tasks. For many OEMs the economic value of operations has even shifted from manufacturing traditional products, to providing services required to operate and maintain their installed base. In general downtime is expensive and maintenance activities are often conducted under time pressure. However, maintenance processes are knowledge intensive and field service technicians have to cope with increasingly complex and diverse systems. To stand out from competitors and to satisfy customer needs, productivity improvement in maintenance processes is urgently required. Augmented Reality (AR) technologies, e.g. head mounted displays (HMD) can assist field service technicians in improving efficiency of maintenance operations. Systems for mobile collaborative AR supported maintenance are commercially available, and the benefits of AR supported maintenance work are generally evident. Still, on a wider scale in the industrial maintenance service delivery, the technology is far from established. From the perspective of small and medium-sized enterprises (SME), with a limited number of field service technicians, remote support for customers and service partners might be an opportunity to enhance resources availability. This study investigates ten business cases of mobile collaborative AR systems using HMDs for services delivery. The research strategy follows an exploratory approach. Based on focus group discussions with representatives of SMEs and semi-structured interviews with industry experts, enablers and barriers for the use of mobile collaborative AR systems are determined.