Furniture sector in Europe is composed of thousands of small and medium enterprises fighting to survive in a more and more competitive market and facing everyday the threat of the China and South Asia exports that are brushing them off the map. INNOVAFUN is the result of a series of projects all based on the ISO-10303-236 "funStep" standard.

INNOVAFUN comes in place to disseminate the different possibilities the funStep standard offer to the furniture industry and helping European SMEs to improve competitiveness through the adoption of open standards in the business relations processes. Starting to describe the different stakeholders involved in the furniture value chain, its relationships and funStep solutions, this deliverable intends to propose a set of use-cases for the adoption of funStep by furniture related organizations. These use-cases do not intend to represent business situations or system behaviours, but the real situations the furniture industry is facing.

Taking into consideration the set of use-cases, the deliverable will propose a set of best practices and guidelines which will be used by the industry in their way to adopt funStep in their buisness. The deliverable tries to state, in a summarized way, the situations the different stakeholders of the furniture sector will face when implementing the funStep standard and solutions, how long it will take, and what might be the return of investment.

Talking in terms of sectors, although the need to take into consideration cross-sectorial aspects was raised while the project was being gestated, the analysis and proposed action plan performed along the document with respect to the ISO 10303-236 standard only focuses on the furniture industry. For the particular case of the e-Business funStep Open Architecture (ebfSOA) –also covered in the funStep standards– for commercial documents, the remaining sectors are analysed inside the figure of the supplier, as they can be a fabrics supplier (textile sector).

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