The extended products paradigm, an introduction

This paper explains and illustrates the extended product paradigm. The main dimensions to extend a product to be considered are the product life cycle, the range of product related information and the resources requested to provide extended (i.e. enterprise networks) on the market. The paper is based on work done in the European Information Society Technologies (IST) project Extended Products in Dynamic Enterprises - EXPIDE. The project objective is to bring together research projects, stakeholders (such as suppliers, manufacturers, consultants, service and technology providers, etc.) involved and interested in the provision of extended products, etc. The project EXPIDE aims to identify future value creation potentials as well as future needs related to the extended product paradigm. The Intelligent Manufacturing Systems (IMS) Global Engineering and Manufacturing in Enterprise Networks GLOBEMEN project contributes to the specification of the Extended Product. The GLOBEMEN project results, especially in the sales and service life cycle phases, illustrate in practice the extended product paradigm. This paper delivers examples from the GLOBEMEN project.