Providing service quickly and competently, worldwide, has become increasingly important as a distinguishing competitive feature in export-oriented industries such as machine and plant manufacturing. Service technicians who work around the globe must be trained and qualified as needed and on the job. Current training contents must be available quickly, and at the same time designed to reflect the complexity and diversity of machines and plants. Learning alongside work is already a reality where increasingly the machine specifies learning times, contents and speed. Traditional learning and support materials are often of only limited use here.

The object of the “eColleagues” project is therefore to develop, implement and test a co-operative on demand learning system that enables service technicians around the world to perform complex services surrounding the product “machine” independently and within the response times demanded by customers, drastically shortening processing cycles. This innovative approach utilises sources of implicit knowledge. Although these already exist within the companies, they are currently not used to a sufficient extent or in a structured manner for teaching and training service technicians.

Infoman AG is a technical development partner on the project, along with leading industrial companies in German machine and plant manufacturing and the Institute for Human Factors and Technology Management (Institut für Arbeitswissenschaft und Technologiemanagement, IAT) of the University of Stuttgart as a research partner.

The project will run from 15th July 2008 until 14th July 2011. eColleagues is sponsored by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research. The project is managed by the German Aerospace Center (DLR).