Are companies ready for the revolution in design:Modelling maturity for virtual prototyping

Companies are meeting growing demands for readiness to respond rapidly to changes from the outside world. Companies actively manage and develop their competences by applying new technologies and methodologies such as virtual prototyping (VP). Nevertheless, no general, structured guidelines for VP implementation are available due to novelty of the use of virtual reality technologies in machine industry. The purpose of our research was to improve the use of VP in companies. In this paper, we describe two company cases from the machine industry that are implementing VP for everyday use. During the research, it became clear that the companies had quite intuitive ways for the VP implementation, and they experienced many challenges. This paper describes how companies can improve VP implementation in a more structured way using the virtual prototyping implementation maturity model (VIRMA). VIRMA supports companies in improving their adaptations of VP and benefitting earlier from VP use in design