Business customer communities and knowledge sharing: Exploratory study of critical issues

Businesses in knowledge intensive industries must appropriately engage with their customers in order to produce goods and services that are desired and valued in the marketplace. Engagement with customers calls for exchanging information and knowledge with customers and fostering exchanges between customers. Recent developments in the area of information and communication technologies (ICTs) have radically increased the variety of opportunities for improving customer engagement. In this paper, we will examine the use of ICTs to build Business Customer Communities (BCCs) to help an organization foster knowledge exchanges between its professional and institutional customers. We define BCCs as groups of business customers, which are deliberately enabled by a firm and share a long-term need to exchange work related knowledge through online and offline interaction. The objectives of this study are (1) to describe BCCs and outline their attributes and features, and (2) to contribute to the understanding of challenges associated with the enabling of BCC formation and how firms can overcome these challenges. As such, a contribution is made to the discussion of knowing in practice in customer communities, which rely in large part on ICT.</p

WSN Evaluation in Industrial Environments First results and lessons learned

The GINSENG project develops performance-controlled wireless sensor networks that can be used for time-critical applications in hostile environments such as industrial plant automation and control. GINSENG aims at integrating wireless sensor networks with existing enterprise resource management solutions using a middleware. A cornerstone is the evaluation in a challenging industrial environment — an oil refinery in Portugal. In this paper we first present our testbed. Then we introduce our solution to access, debug and flash the sensor nodes remotely from an operations room in the plant or from any location with Internet access. We further present our experimental methodology and show some exemplary results from the refinery testbed

The GINSENG system for wireless monitoring and Control:design and deployment experiences

Today’s industrial facilities such as oil refineries, chemical plants and factories rely on wired sensor systems to monitor and control the production processes. The deployment and maintenance of such cabled systems is expensive and inflexible. It is therefore desirable to replace or augment these systems using wireless technology which requires us to overcome significant technical challenges. Process automation and control applications are mission-critical and require timely and reliable data delivery, which is difficult to provide in industrial environments with harsh radio environments. In this paper we present the GINSENG system which implements performance control to allow us to use wireless sensor networks for mission-critical applications in industrial environments. GINSENG is a complete system solution that comprises on-node system software, network protocols, and back-end systems with sophisticated data processing capability. GINSENG assumes that a deployment can be carefully planned. A TDMA-based MAC protocol, tailored to the deployment environment is employed to provide reliable and timely data delivery. Performance debugging components are used to unintrusively monitor the system performance and identify problems as they occur. The paper reports on a real-world deployment of GINSENG in an especially challenging environment of an operational oil refinery in Sines, Portugal. We provide experimental results from this deployment and share the experiences gained. These results demonstrate the use of GINSENG for sensing and actuation and allow an assessment of its ability to operate within the required performance bounds. We also identify shortcomings that manifested during the evaluation phase, thus giving a useful perspective on the challenges that have to be overcome in these harsh application settings