Identifying design requirements for emerging markets

The manufacturing industry’s interest in emerging markets has been increasing dramatically during the recent decades as their economy is growing. Western companies are making efforts to develop products for emerging markets but are also facing various challenges in the process of doing so. One major challenge is the identification of reliable and valuable design requirements. This study aims at investigating the influence of the emerging market context on the practice of identifying design requirements. A survey among Danish industry was conducted with 130 responses collected. 92 answers provided an insight into design requirement identification in a western context, whereas 62 provided an insight into both emerging and western contexts. The results indicate the importance of design requirement identification when developing for emerging markets. Requirement elicitation and analysis are the most challenging phases in a design requirement identification process for both western and emerging markets. For Danish companies, identifying design requirements for emerging markets is more difficult than that for western markets, particularly when considering user needs, governmental regulations and organizational infrastructures

Transforming Multidisciplinary Customer Requirements to Product Design Specifications

With the increasing of complexity of complex mechatronic products, it is necessary to involve multidisciplinary design teams, thus, the traditional customer requirements modeling for a single discipline team becomes difficult to be applied in a multidisciplinary team and project since team members with various disciplinary backgrounds may have different interpretations of the customers’ requirements. A new synthesized multidisciplinary customer requirements modeling method is provided for obtaining and describing the common understanding of customer requirements (CRs) and more importantly transferring them into a detailed and accurate product design specifications (PDS) to interact with different team members effectively. A case study of designing a high speed train verifies the rationality and feasibility of the proposed multidisciplinary requirement modeling method for complex mechatronic product development. This proposed research offersthe instruction to realize the customer-driven personalized customization of complex mechatronic product

Towards customization : Evaluation of integrated sales, product, and production configuration

Acknowledgement We are grateful to the anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments, which helped us improve both the quality and presentation of the paper.Peer reviewedPostprin

Dealing With Ambiguous and Fluctuating Requirements of Embedded System Development: A Case-Study

This paper presents the findings of a case study that investigates how developers and managers deal with ambiguous and fluctuating requirements during an embedded system development in a structured process management environment. In particular, this paper focuses on improvisation and bricolage actions as a coping strategy by software developers and managers. This research adopts an interpretive approach that involves the collection and analysis of qualitative data. In this study, we observed a turbulent environment with situated improvisational and bricolage responses from developers and managers. The organizational structured process management framework was not sophisticated enough to deal with the existing challenges. Moreover, some improvisational and bricolage activities became institutionalized and, hence, became organizational routines of developers and managers. This paper indicates the value of reflexive practices as vital issues for strategic conduct in the event that improvisational and bricolage activities were deployed as a coping strategy

Requirements Engineering for Product Service Systems - A State of the Art Analysis

In recent years, manufacturing companies and service providers have moved towards offering customer-specific problem solutions. These integrated bundles usually consist of hardware, software, and service components and are called product service systems (PSS) or hybrid products. Since the success of the resulting solution depends on the understanding of all requirements, requirements engineering (RE) has become a key factor. The article analyzes the state of the art of RE for PSS based on an extensive literature review in the domains of product-, software-, and service engineering. For this, criteria are derived from the characteristics of PSS and from the task area of RE in the life cycle of PSS. Based on these criteria we analyze the most established RE approaches for their suitability for PSS. An important finding is that integrated/interdisciplinary approaches for RE are missing. Moreover, the maturity of RE approaches in the three domains varies significantly. All analyzed approaches heavily rely on concepts and solution characteristics of their own domain so that a transfer to other domains is hardly possible. This literature review lays the foundation for successful RE for PSS and especially for future research aiming at combining and integrating RE approaches and models of product-, software-, and service engineering. Such requirement models could connect concepts of single domains and enable an integrated and seamless RE for PSS

Success factors in technology-push innovation process

Teknologian työntövoiman ajama innovaatioprosessi käynnistyy yrityksen sisäisen toiminnan tuloksena. Yritys pyrkii luomaan innovaation ilman, että markkinoilla olisi kysyntää uutta tuotetta kohtaan. Innovaatioiden ympärillä olevaa uuden luomiseen liittyvää prosessia on tutkittu laajasti kirjallisuudessa, mutta teknologian työntövoimaan vaikuttavia menestystekijöitä on silti vaikea listata. Tämän tutkielman on tarkoitus ensin määritellä innovaatio tyypit ja myöhemmin käsitellä teknologian työntövoiman menestystekijöitä jatkaen aiempaan kirjallisuuteen perustuvaa tutkimusta. Tutkimus vastaa kysymykseen, miten luoda menestyvä teknologinen työntö? Aineisto on kerätty aiemmasta kirjallisuudesta, kolmesta haastattelusta, sekä kahdesta case tutkimuksesta. Haastattelut tarjoavat käytännönläheisen näkökulman ja case tutkimukset käsittelevät aihetta kahden yrityksen, Nokian ja Applen avulla. Tutkimustulokset jatkavat aiempaa tutkimusta luomalla kattavamman listan menestykseen vaikuttavista tekijöistä. Tutkimus osoittaa, että teknologisen työntövoiman innovaatioprosessin menestymiseen vaikuttavat yrityksen yhteistyökyky, organisaatiokulttuuri, riskien hallinta, sekä kyky hyödyntää aiemmin toteutettuja, toimivia ratkaisuja uusissa innovaatioissa.fi=Opinnäytetyö kokotekstinä PDF-muodossa.|en=Thesis fulltext in PDF format.|sv=Lärdomsprov tillgängligt som fulltext i PDF-format

Data-driven design: The new challenges of digitalization on product design and development

Digitalization and the momentous role being assumed by data are commonly viewed as pervasive phenomena whose impact is felt in all aspects of society and the economy. Design activity is by no means immune from this trend, and the relationship between digitalization and design is decades old. However, what is the current impact of this 'data revolution' on design? How will the design activity change? What are the resulting research questions of interest to academics? What are the main challenges for firms and for educational institutions having to cope with this change? The paper provides a comprehensive conceptual framework, based on recent literature and anecdotal evidence from the industry. It identifies three main streams: namely the consequences on designers, the consequences on design processes and the role of methods for data analytics. In turn, these three streams lead to implications at individual, organizational and managerial level, and several questions arise worthy of defining future research agendas. Moreover, the paper introduces relational diagrams depicting the interactions between the objects and the actors involved in the design process and suggests that what is occurring is by no means a simple evolution but a paradigmatic shift in the way artefacts are designed