Aeg Electrocom

Rationale: European industry is presently undergoing the radical and painful process of business transformation in order to maintain a competitive level on a global scale. The identification and focus on core competences defined the necessary strategic alignments. Main functions such as manufacturing, design and engineering, marketing, sales and services are being reengineered to process-driven customer-oriented entity. Need for action: 'Research and Development' has been identified as one of the remaining core business processes requiring immediate attention. A series of workshops conducted by the European IT Industry Round Table companies identified severe current problems and signposted directions for substantial new orientation. Major member companies expect a productivity benefit of up to 30% after transformation of their R&D function. Objectives: A holistic approach is necessary to transform R&D. Therefore, the core R&D processes will be re-engineered with regard to the following three dimensions of R & D management: 'Human resource management', 'process engineering and management' and 'Information and communication technologies' as an infrastructural enabler. Approach: The topic is highly complex. Therefore, the objectives are purposely limited to the provision of adequate prototypes of methods and tools as a first step. Prototypes of methods and tools for the transformation are developed from generic tool-sets and frameworks for this subclass of business processes. This is done on the basis of a classification and evaluation of best practice for R & D as well as case studies in order to identify gaps. Results: Tangible results include the provision of methodology and a guidance model for planning BPR in R&D process management. Furthermore, a prototype of an assessment tool-set for BPR in this area as well as a prototype of best practice database will be developed. Dissemination/Exploitation: The results will be disseminated to European Industry and the European business community using World Wide Web services. European Industry as problem owners will exploit the results internally whereas the solution providers will exploit the results externally within the European business community. Partners: The consortium brings together representative global players from European Industry as process (i.e. problem) owners and solution providers from academia, transfer institutions and consultancy.

Technology in Mail Business Re-engineering (TIMBRE) is a process integration and re-engineering project aiming to achieve 30 to 40% improvement in the productivity of the European Postal Service. The first - Requirements and Definition - phase of TIMBRE is being undertaken by a Consortium comprising the Postal Services of Denmark, Ireland and the U.K., together with AEG Electrocom, Elsag Bailey and Pitney Bowes, and led by IPC Technology. This phase has been separated from the main project so that the Consortium can ensure that the full project definition reflects the needs of all European Posts, and so as to provide other Posts with the opportunity to participate in the project paper. The Postal Service is one of the world's largest and most international service industries. European volumes exceed 80 billion items, resulting in a turnover of ECU 30 bn p.a., providing employment to more than 1.4 million persons and serving a customer base which includes virtually all businesses and private consumers. The industry has survived and grown despite many prophesies of its being overtaken by technological advances such as telegraph and facsimile. Even so, the Post is today more under threat than ever before and there is already evidence of a decline in volumes in certain sectors of the market, particularly in the area of business to business mail. Threats arise from many sources, including: - increased competition, particularly in the context of market liberalisation - substitution of mail by electronic alternatives, including facsimile, E-mail, EDI, on-line banking services, videotex, telephone and interactive television - revenue loss through fraud and mismatch between payment and service used. At the same time, technological developments create the opportunity for major improvements in the efficiency with which the Posts operate. These developments are of most significance in the fields of mechanisation, OCR, item identification and tracking, printing technology and multi-media communications. If the Posts are to meet the new challenges presented by increasing market liberalisation and electronic alternatives to traditional mail, they must respond by offering new and improved services, greater efficiency of operation and higher reliability. This can no longer be achieved, as it was in the past, by tinkering with existing procedures, nor by piecemeal adoption of new technology. It is essential that effective use is made of Information Technology in order to gain control over the postal process on a fully end-to-end customer to customer - basis. What is needed is for the Posts to re-engineer the whole postal process, using Information Technology advances to (re)gain control over the physical handling process. The intended solution is to conduct a thorough review of the whole postal process, from customer payment for and submission of mail through to delivery to the addressee. This review will identify the opportunities for major Process Integration and improvement resulting from the application of Information Technology. Based on this review, the intent is to go on to define proposed standards, for application within the Postal Service, for the exchange of and access to information which will be required to implement these improvements in practice. This definition work will be accompanied by operational pilot trials both to verify the projected costs and benefits and to validate the practicality of the proposed standards. Ultimately, it is believed that TIMBRE has the potential to yield savings of 20% or more - ECU 6 billions p.a. - in costs, together with extra re venues of several hundred million ECU p.a. as a result of reduced levels of fraud and underpayment. The full benefits will take 10 years or more to realise, but the project has been designed in such a way that exploitable initial results should be demonstrable on a pilot scale within two years and on a wider European scale within 3 to 5 years. Tale up of the results should be assured by the very nature of the project Consortium, which brings together the real user organisations - the Posts themselves - with their key technology suppliers. Moreover, dissemination of the results to non-partner Post organisations will occur through the medium of IPC, the project coordinator, which is jointly owned by 21 Posts, including those of all 15 EU Member States.

Technology in Mail Business Re-engineering (TIMBRE) is a process integration and re-engineering project aiming to achieve 30 to 40% improvement in the productivity of the European Postal Service. The first - Requirements and Definition - phase of TIMBRE is being undertaken by a Consortium comprising the Postal Services of Denmark, Ireland and the U.K., together with AEG Electrocom, Elsag Bailey and Pitney Bowes, and led by IPC Technology. This phase has been separated from the main project so that the Consortium can ensure that the full project definition reflects the needs of all European Posts, and so as to provide other Posts with the opportunity to participate in the project paper. The Postal Service is one of the world's largest and most international service industries. European volumes exceed 80 billion items, resulting in a turnover of ECU 30 bn p.a., providing employment to more than 1.4 million persons and serving a customer base which includes virtually all businesses and private consumers. The industry has survived and grown despite many prophesies of its being overtaken by technological advances such as telegraph and facsimile. Even so, the Post is today more under threat than ever before and there is already evidence of a decline in volumes in certain sectors of the market, particularly in the area of business to business mail. Threats arise from many sources, including: - increased competition, particularly in the context of market liberalisation - substitution of mail by electronic alternatives, including facsimile, E-mail, EDI, on-line banking services, videotex, telephone and interactive television - revenue loss through fraud and mismatch between payment and service used. At the same time, technological developments create the opportunity for major improvements in the efficiency with which the Posts operate. These developments are of most significance in the fields of mechanisation, OCR, item identification and tracking, printing technology and multi-media communications. If the Posts are to meet the new challenges presented by increasing market liberalisation and electronic alternatives to traditional mail, they must respond by offering new and improved services, greater efficiency of operation and higher reliability. This can no longer be achieved, as it was in the past, by tinkering with existing procedures, nor by piecemeal adoption of new technology. It is essential that effective use is made of Information Technology in order to gain control over the postal process on a fully end-to-end customer to customer - basis. What is needed is for the Posts to re-engineer the whole postal process, using Information Technology advances to (re)gain control over the physical handling process. The intended solution is to conduct a thorough review of the whole postal process, from customer payment for and submission of mail through to delivery to the addressee. This review will identify the opportunities for major Process Integration and improvement resulting from the application of Information Technology. Based on this review, the intent is to go on to define proposed standards, for application within the Postal Service, for the exchange of and access to information which will be required to implement these improvements in practice. This definition work will be accompanied by operational pilot trials both to verify the projected costs and benefits and to validate the practicality of the proposed standards. Ultimately, it is believed that TIMBRE has the potential to yield savings of 20% or more - ECU 6 billions p.a. - in costs, together with extra re venues of several hundred million ECU p.a. as a result of reduced levels of fraud and underpayment. The full benefits will take 10 years or more to realise, but the project has been designed in such a way that exploitable initial results should be demonstrable on a pilot scale within two years and on a wider European scale within 3 to 5 years. Tale up of the results should be assured by the very nature of the project Consortium, which brings together the real user organisations - the Posts themselves - with their key technology suppliers. Moreover, dissemination of the results to non-partner Post organisations will occur through the medium of IPC, the project coordinator, which is jointly owned by 21 Posts, including those of all 15 EU Member States.

CLEOPATRA represents a cluster of applications having in common the introduction of HPC into industrial real-time systems. The high performance computing hardware and software appears as an embedded system rather than a stand-alone marketable product. A main project deliverable will be a set of procedures to aid the efficient transfer of algorithmic know-how into embedded real-time HPC parallel systems. This will capture the experience gained by the whole consortium and will include the issues involved in third-party hardware and software procurement.

The selected application demonstrators to be developed represent next generation products for well established running business: a rescue-service helicopter pilot support system an intelligent cruise control to support drivers on public roads an automatic mail address reader a multi-country cheque reader a graphic recognition system for technical drawings and maps an automated robot for welding ships hulls. The results achieved in the HAMLET (6290) and ARVISA (5225) projects provide the basis for CLEOPATRA.

The principle CAPE objective has been to lay the foundations for an improved intra-community postal service, in which cross-border post would function in a seamless manner, with service levels that are consistent with those applicable in the best-served EU Member States. Such a cross-border service is a major factor in preparing the 'level playing field' of Europe, where organisations in any Member State can compete on equal terms with those in other States. The project addressed two aspects of cross-border mail in related pilot applications. The Quality Management Information System (QMIS) part of the project had the objectives of providing tracking (data collection) systems to monitor the handling of international mail and of providing tools for analysing the resulting data. The Postal Electronic Mail (PEM) sub-project had the objectives of specifying, designing and developing interconnections between the French, German, Irish and Italian postal electronic mail systems.

QMIS is making significant contributions to the improvement of procedures for the processing of international mail. Participating offices of exchange now receive electronic pre-advice of all international shipments of mail. Resulting improvements range from optimisation and co-ordination of transport schedules to more accurate prediction of required staffing levels. Notification of receipt of shipments is also returned electronically; any discrepancies can be resolved in a fraction of the time required by manual systems. The process also allows total automation of the associated international accounting between postal administrations. The PEM pilot project has demonstrated the feasibility of interconnecting individual national systems, and of providing a next-day physical delivery for mail submitted electronically in one country for delivery in another. For telematic purposes, use is made of an international X.25 network, and messages are exchanged using an X.400 messaging service. For the QMIS sub-project, the messages themselves are defined in accordance with the EDIFACT IFTMFR Framework. The project has succeeded in ensuring that EDI and bar-coding standardisation are given the highest possible priority by the ETSG. The partners have contributed significantly to the practical definition of the first four messages to de defined under the IFTMFR Framework. Several standards issues have arisen during the project, related to the use of X.400 series standards.

From an applications viewpoint, the QMIS system is constructed as a hierarchy of inter-related subsystems, corresponding to three levels of functionality: - Management Level, including volume measurement and quality of service measurement. - Postal Network Level, supporting receptacle tracking, detecting misdirected receptacles, downstream notification of receptacle and mail volumes, exception handling and messaging and enquiry handling. - Data Collection and Interchange Level, relating to the standards used for data collection and interchange purposes, and covering three key aspects: bar-coding, message standards, and communication standards. All information is routed between individual offices of exchange and a national Gateway via the national system. The National Gateway provides a national enquiry system and a unique national interface into the QMIS European EDI network. This European network interconnects all partners, and also copies all messages to a European central server which can produce multilateral reports on quality of service. The PEM project defined and demonstrated a European service by means of a prototype. Several elements were addressed to enable interoperability between National PEM networks. This included: - development of a European Service Profile, - development of a 'European PEM Gateway' in each participating country, - interconnection testing between the heterogeneous PEM systems.