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- Ahlin, Karin, 1963-
(författare)
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Benefits of Digital Technical Information
- 2020
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- In our daily work life, we use a wealth of information, including a category of information produced as a part of products and their life-cycle phases, named digital technical information (DTI). Manufacturing organizations focus more often on the product than on DTI, because DTI’s impact seems almost invisible, despite its crucial role to the product and its life-cycle phases, development, production, maintenance, and destruction. Hence, the aim of this thesis is to describe DTI’s benefits and the research questions: “What are the benefits of the DTI?” and “What are the perceptions of how to measure benefits of DTI?” The thesis contains five studies related to identifying and measuring DTI’s benefits. The empirical material is based on semi-structured interviews and group interviews within five organizations and a survey among manufacturing organizations in Sweden.I used three characteristics of the DTI and two pairs of previously known benefit categories to analyse the benefits. The analysis shows that the benefits are recognized in the particular product’s life cycle phase where the DTI is published. However, the DTI continues to offer benefits in the product’s other life cycle phases. In relationship to the product, the benefits evolve from supporting an individual product to supporting more general product lines or all products and a more complex product is said to increase DTI’s benefits. DTI’s structure adds benefits as synthesized or aggregated DTI, where the DTI is synthesized or aggregated automatically or manually. The categorization predetermined benefits related to the change are less numerous than the emerging benefits. The predetermined benefits are strategic by nature, and the emerging ones are mainly used to achieve operational goals. Measuring DTI’s benefits is of importance for a formal comparison of its development and is of special interest for managers. Perceptions from the initial stages on how to measure show that to establish common interpretations among the stakeholders of the measurement process is of importance, especially when it comes to what is viewed as a benefit. The benefits are viewed as intangible by the respondents, which creates difficulties when one is evaluating, using conventional measurement methods. The only perceived way to measure is when DTI reduces co-worker’s workload and efficiency is achieved. The thesis’s contribution to academia consists of the analysis of DTI’s benefits, showing details of the relationships between the DTI and its benefits. For practice, the contributions focus on the systematic evaluation process, which can be used for further development of the DTI and comparison of the evolvement of the DTI itself and relating to other resources. One proposal for future research is to use the analysed benefits and compare various approaches to digitizing DTI, e.g. Industry 4.0. Another proposal is to list, in detail, various ways on how to measure DTI’s benefits and their usefulness. The latter can positively impact on any intangible benefits due to the general approach we have established of how to measure those benefits.
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| 2. |
- Wenngren, Johan
(författare)
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Team activities in concept development : Addressing open-ended problems
- 2016
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The concept development stage is a fundamental part of the development process; in this early stage, teams define what constitutes the problem and find direction for the subsequent problem-solving activities. Concept development that searches for innovative results starts from a problem formulation, or design brief, that should not be too precise; keeping parts open for interpretation and alternatives is important for allowing for the possibility to create new solutions. However, handling such open-ended development problems is a challenge as they do not point to a specific solution from the start. The difficulties that the development team encounters in order to find a way forward are the focus of this thesis. Thus, the purpose of this thesis is to identify, describe and discuss how teams explore and define open-ended problems in concept development. Fundamentally, teams have to explore and define open-ended problems in order to retrieve answers needed to undertake purposeful actions. The exploration and definition procedure creates stepwise understanding of sub-problems as open-ended problems typically have interdependencies. This implies that the team must suggest a number of representations before they can propose corresponding alternative solutions. The failure to adopt such a procedure leads to a risk of fixation and prematurely closing the definition of what constitutes the core issues of the design problem. This study specifically shows that confronting the design brief or task is an essential activity in the resolution of open-ended problems. Moreover, a number of practical steps for iteratively managing open-ended problem resolution are proposed. The study in this thesis is based on an explorative approach utilising experiments and observations as methods for data collection. The empirical data come from a workshop format (i.e., an innovation contest), teams on student projects and, to some extent, companies. The contribution from this thesis to engineering design relates mainly to the social and participatory aspects of innovation in concept development. The contribution to practice is mainly the formulation of iterative steps; these could be applicable to different types of open-ended problem resolution. One additional area of application may be a more modern type of product development in the manufacturing industry — namely, where product logics and service logics are interlinked.
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