CREATING NEW COLLABORATION MODELS AND IMPLEMENTING E-SERVICES FOR ENERGY EFFICIENT OPERATIONS OF SMEs

“Working together – Finding practical solutions”

Framework for Collaboration – Living Labs

If you are in the transportation/logistic sector then you are aware that the sector today is faced with numerous challenges from its impact on climate change and air pollution, noise, congestion and infrastructure wear & tear to ever rising costs of fuel, vehicle taxes, infrastructure charges, insurance taxes and administrative costs. And all this is affecting company’s profitability. In order to turn some of these challenges into the opportunities CO-EFFICIENT project creates a working environment of Living Lab in which SMEs are able to presents their problems/needs and work together with R&D organisations and other stakeholders in finding and testing practical solutions.

If you feel we’re addressing your problems – our Living Lab might be just the solution you’re looking for. Please feel free to contact our regional partner and you will be provided with full information on how you can benefit from our activities.

eServices Living Lab

eServices Living Lab is one of two Living Labs created within the scope of the Project. Specifically it implements and tests eServices as tools for problem solving related to:

1. Transport planning – aggregating the transport demand, on a daily basis, from all the members of enterprise network and other co-networks;

2. Distributed planning and re-planning – finding best network configuration that will satisfy customer orders but will, among other things, minimize the total distance covered by network vehicles;

3. Document dematerialisation – applying innovative solutions for automatic extraction of data and their automatic transformation to e-format for interoperability purposes.

The Living Lab consists of supply chain and/or production SMEs, R&D institutions and industry organizations.

Expected results of eServices Living Lab and Benefits for End Users

SMEs as active “end users” will be able to: • experiment and utilize the products and services

provided according to their specific interests and use intentions;

• receive feedback to the Living Lab;• cooperate and share experiences with other

stakeholders involved.

The most important results expected are:• Proof of concept – understanding that relevant energy

savings can be obtained by simply collaborating with partners and with the support of available tailored software solutions;

• Optimal adoption – knowledge of variety of pilot cased, showing good or bad practices in eServices use;

• Free availability and use of suite of eServices – well – tuned eServices made accessible to the SMEs in different regions.

Co-efficient Project Summary

The basic premises are simple– most SMEs in the Mediterranean, especially in the manufacturing and logistic sector are not as energy efficient as they could be. The share of energy costs in their products and services is too high and affects their competitiveness. This can be attributed to the fact that SMEs do not have sufficient resources available for research and innovation that would enhance their energy efficiency. Even when new technologies exist and are available the implementation at SME level is weak.

There is obvious need for creating new models to support SMEs to increase their innovation capacity and allow them to apply new solutions for existing problems.

CO-EFFICIENT will create collaborative framework of two “Living Labs” on transnational level that will assist SMEs with limited R&D capacities to collaborate with R&D institutions in order to find and implement solutions customized to their problems in their day to day operations.

The Project Partnership:

CO – EFFICIENT consists of a strong partnership composed of university, development agencies, research institutes and foundations, national SMEs and transport associations, innovation commercialization company and SMEs support institution that promote importance of implementing innovative solutions at SME level.

University of Maribor, (Slovenia): www.um.si;Regional Development Agency Mura (Slovenia): web.rra-mura.comInstitute for Transport and Logistic (Italy): www.fondazioneitl.orgCNA Modena (Italy): www.mo.cna.it SATA (Italy): www.satanet.it Valenciaport Foundation (Spain): www.fundacion.valenciaport.com CIERVAL (Spain): www.cierval.esAFT (France): www.ast -ist im.comRegional Development Agency Slavonia and Baranja (Croatia): www.slavonija.hr

Centre for Entrepreneurship Osijek (Croatia): www.czposijek.hr