Establishing a maturity model for design automation in sales-delivery processes of ETO products

Short delivery times are considered a competitive advantage in the engineer-to-order (ETO) sector. Design-related tasks contribute to a substantial amount of delivery times and costs since ETO products have to be either fully developed or adapted to customer specifications within tendering or order fulfillment. Approaches aiming at a computerised automation of tasks related to the design process, often termed design automation or knowledge-based engineering, are generally regarded as an effective means to achieve lead time and cost reductions while maintaining, or even improving product quality. In this study we propose a maturity model as a framework for analyzing and improving such activities in ETO companies. We contribute to the literature in being the first to investigate design automation in the ETO sector from a maturity perspective. Beyond that, we extend the extant literature on design automation, which is of a highly technical nature, by providing a framework considering organizational and managerial aspects. The findings indicate that five different levels of maturity can be achieved across the dimensions strategies, processes, systems, and people. Empirical cases give insight into these different levels. Our investigation draws from extant literature and a comparative case study involving four companies over two years

Managing design variety, process variety and engineering change: a case study of two capital good firms

Many capital good firms deliver products that are not strictly one-off, but instead share a certain degree of similarity with other deliveries. In the delivery of the product, they aim to balance stability and variety in their product design and processes. The issue of engineering change plays an important in how they manage to do so. Our aim is to gain more understanding into how capital good firms manage engineering change, design variety and process variety, and into the role of the product delivery strategies they thereby use. Product delivery strategies are defined as the type of engineering work that is done independent of an order and the specification freedom the customer has in the remaining part of the design. Based on the within-case and cross-case analysis of two capital good firms several mechanisms for managing engineering change, design variety and process variety are distilled. It was found that there exist different ways of (1) managing generic design information, (2) isolating large engineering changes, (3) managing process variety, (4) designing and executing engineering change processes. Together with different product delivery strategies these mechanisms can be placed within an archetypes framework of engineering change management. On one side of the spectrum capital good firms operate according to open product delivery strategies, have some practices in place to investigate design reuse potential, isolate discontinuous engineering changes into the first deliveries of the product, employ ‘probe and learn’ process management principles in order to allow evolving insights to be accurately executed and have informal engineering change processes. On the other side of the spectrum capital good firms operate according to a closed product delivery strategy, focus on prevention of engineering changes based on design standards, need no isolation mechanisms for discontinuous engineering changes, have formal process management practices in place and make use of closed and formal engineering change procedures. The framework should help managers to (1) analyze existing configurations of product delivery strategies, product and process designs and engineering change management and (2) reconfigure any of these elements according to a ‘misfit’ derived from the framework. Since this is one of the few in-depth empirical studies into engineering change management in the capital good sector, our work adds to the understanding on the various ways in which engineering change can be dealt with

Maturity models : Taking stock and moving forward

Maturity models (MMs) are based on the premise that improved maturity in organisational capabilities leads to improvements in the desired outcome measures. This promising potential explains the growing popularity of MMs and the large number of publications on the subject in various academic and professional journals. The present study is based on an analysis of 339 MM papers published in 193 journals between 1973 and 2017. After giving a brief overview of the theoretical underpinnings of MMs, the authors focus on answering the question of ‘where to publish to achieve maximum impact’ from the perspective of potential authors. The impact of a publication, measured by the number of citations collected over its lifetime, is influenced by the quality of the journal (measured by the journal’s article influence score by Clarivate Analytics, Scimago Journal Ranking by Scimago, and Scimago Q category) and the length of public availability of the publication. Results from a variety of partitioning models (decision tree, bootstrap forest, and boosted tree) show that publishing in high-quality, recognised journals tends to result in more citations. In other words, in a network of journals, not all citations are equal as citations in selective, highly ranked journals are more equal than others. It is also important to emphasise that Scimago’s Q classification has no bearing on a paper’s post-publication success; Q classification is a noisy and poor measure of a journal’s quality that is not used globally

Maturity models – Taking stock and moving forward

Maturity models (MMs) are based on the premise that improved maturity in organisational capabilities leads to improvements in the desired outcome measures. This promising potential explains the growing popularity of MMs and the large number of publications on the subject in various academic and professional journals. The present study is based on an analysis of 339 MM papers published in 193 journals between 1973 and 2017. After giving a brief overview of the theoretical underpinnings of MMs, the authors focus on answering the question of ‘where to publish to achieve maximum impact’ from the perspective of potential authors. The impact of a publication, measured by the number of citations collected over its lifetime, is influenced by the quality of the journal (measured by the journal’s article influence score by Clarivate Analytics, Scimago Journal Ranking by Scimago, and Scimago Q category) and the length of public availability of the publication. Results from a variety of partitioning models (decision tree, bootstrap forest, and boosted tree) show that publishing in high-quality, recognised journals tends to result in more citations. In other words, in a network of journals, not all citations are equal as citations in selective, highly ranked journals are more equal than others. It is also important to emphasise that Scimago’s Q classification has no bearing on a paper’s post-publication success; Q classification is a noisy and poor measure of a journal’s quality that is not used globally

An empirical analysis of maturity model to assess information systems success: a firm-level perspective

This research investigates the relationship between IS investment and IS success and the moderating effects of IS maturity. We find the moderating role of IS maturity between IS investment and IS success with a contingency perspective. As administering a group survey of about 300 business executives across multiple industries, the results of this study indicate that IS investment is a critical antecedent of IS success, and IS maturity has a positive moderating effect on this relationship. The implication of the findings implies that global companies should consider the maturity of their IS management: as a crucial factor in maximising the effectiveness of IS investment

Lean product development: nothing new under the sun?

The concept of lean product development has attracted the attention of many scholars since its inception in the 1990s derived from practices at Toyota Motor Company. Key to this approach to new product development (NPD) are a few methods derived from lean production as well as longer established practices such as concurrent engineering. This makes one wonder whether lean product development is a new practice, a new method or an encapsulation of already existing methods at the time; this quest for the roots and tenets of lean product development, also in comparison with other methods for NPD, is the focus of this paper. This journey takes this propositional paper not only to the roots of lean product development and the context of its era of conception, but also to what this concept adds to other extant methods for NPD. In particular, this comparison draws out that other methods are trying to achieve the same objectives: the creation of products and services with value to the customer, the reduction of time-to-market and the efficient use of resources. This inference implies that managers of new product (and service) development can choose from a wider pallet of methods and approaches to enhance the performance of R&D and to connect better to manufacturing (including supply chains). Inevitably, this has implications for research on (lean) product and service development; hence, this paper sets out a research agenda based on the deliberations and gaps that have been uncovered in the discourse

Measuring the maturity of Indian small and medium enterprises for unofficial readiness for capability maturity model integration-based software process improvement

Establishing the maturity levels of ‐ Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) without Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) certification has always been regarded as an extremely challenging task. Software process improvement (SPI) has targeted to monitor and improve software processes, thereby improving the software business. Although there is scientific interest in SPI, little attention has been specifically given to the exploration of maturity levels for non‐CMMI SMEs. The goal is to explore the effect of time on process maturity and maturity levels achieved informally or unofficially by SMEs that are not otherwise CMMI certified. To find out the maturity levels achieved informally, a CMMI‐DEV v1.3 based survey questionnaire is administered to Indian software SMEs. Time of establishment of SMEs and follow‐up of CMMI‐based processes and practices unofficially are used as two important parameters to decide upon process maturity and achievement of specific CMMI level informally. This paper has been successful in ascertaining the effect of time of establishment of SMEs and follow‐up of CMMI‐based processes on process maturity using proposed RuleML that advocates adoption of more than 70% of CMMI‐DEV v1.3 process area‐specific practices for an SME to be unofficially ready for CMMI‐based SPI initiatives. The findings manifest multidimensional aspects of unofficial readiness of SMEs for CMMI‐based SPI that can be used by relevant authorities to select SMEs for funding for SPI initiatives. Finally, the proposed work has been validated statistically using t‐test for CMMI Level II and Level III