Use-it-wisely was a European Union research project, funded under the FP7 framework, which ran from 2013 to 2016. The project drawed on the world class knowledge of twenty partners from all over Europe, who were all leaders in their respective fields including: energy, machinery, space, office workspace, vehicles, ship building, furniture, academia, research, dissemination and exploitation.

The project was focused on the end-user. It enabled European manufacturers to produce products and services capable of being adaptive to rapidly changing markets, to the changing business environment, and customer goals by demonstrating the state of the art business model and platform, which enabled lifelong adaptation of high investment product-service. The adaptation was accomplished by a purposeful and demand-led sequence of innovative continuous product-service upgrades. The project went through vital steps to ensure a successful outcome. These include: platform development, the design of prototypes, testing of prototypes, demonstration and execution, and key communications and exploitation tasks.

Key actions:

Use-it-wisely developed and demonstrated the adaptation platform consisting of the following three elements:

1. A multi-disciplinary actors-product-service system model;
2. An adaptation mechanism based on the knowledge and skills of all actors involved with the system;
3. An interactive collaborative distributed environment, where the partners work out the adaptation steps.

The Use-it-wisely approach resulted in a scientific breakthrough by creating and validating a holistic systems engineering structure that combined human-machine systems, product lifecycle management, business and organisational dynamics and lifecycle assessment.

The Use-it-wisely approach was unique as its application dimension was made up of six Clusters combining research institutions and industries. Clustering was as advantage as it exploited the strong links between the research organisations and industry, allowing for a more productive project and in turn, greater benefits for the end user.

Benefits:

1. Product scope: high investment, durable, long service life, one of a kind or highly customised products (the longer the life, the more the opportunity for upgrades);
2. Application scope: human-system integration issues (human-related uncertainty is handled by the human actors in the adaptation loop);

The Use-it-wisely project delivered significant benefits for Europe, by enabling European Manufacturers to provide products and services capable of being adaptive to new customer goals and rapidly changing markets. The project  investigated a new business model that implemented continuous product-service adaptation through a sequence of small innovative steps.

SEAbility was a participant in Cluster 5 offering end-user consultancy services and acting on behalf of large naval firms in purchasing or modifying boat transactions. The cluster focused on the lifecycle of small craft passenger boats that are made of composite materials. The goal was to develop a user-friendly, dynamic, information-rich technical metafile for the vessel that included all aspects of the vessel including; initial customer specifications, required regulations, shipyard designs, final sea-trial data and post-delivery surveys and inspections.