Objective
Europe's office-furniture industry which is mainly represented by SMEs is currently facing three tasks: firstly, there are increasingly aggressive suppliers from overseas that gain market share; secondly, Europe's offices are changing from centralized to decentralized units (office-at-home or teleworking). Finally, new scientific results concerning health, ecology, and design have to be taken into consideration for producing and selling office furniture. On the other hand, technical progress (Multimedia, Internet, Prototypes for Electronic Sales Assistance, Virtual Reality Applications, etc.) offers chances for SMEs to open up new market segments if they can reach consumers from even remote or non-european locations and if they can establish a progressive, social, and ecological image. The principle actions of Men@Work are therefore to develop: a multilingual and multimedia information system of ergonomics, ecology, and health as far as office furniture is concerned, Electronic Product Catalogues for multimedia presentation of office furniture and tools for the automatic transfer of these systems to the WWW, Electronic Sales Assistants to overcome the problem of missing human sales personnel in a computerized environment, a visualization programme for different office layouts using VRML (Virtual Reality Modeling Language) to enhance office furniture sales, a marketing concept for Men@Work to promote the service, make it available for not directly involved companies, and to encourage them to become future participants to present their products and services. The Men@Work consortium is exceptionally well suited to achieve these objectives as it combines key European expertise in Technology (WWL Online-Services Germany and as a subcontractor for visualization: Crystal Design, Italy), high-quality enterprises of the European office furniture industry (Bene Austria, Martela Finland, etc.), major European developers of knowledge-based tools for multimedia selling and presentation of products (FORWISS Germany) as well as a leading consultancy in publishing and marketing of furniture (OfficeMedia Consult Germany).
Topic(s)
Data not availableCall for proposal
Data not availableFunding Scheme
CSC - Cost-sharing contractsCoordinator
90449 Nürnberg
Germany