CPPS-3D: a methodology to support cyber physical production systems design, development and deployment

Master’s dissertation in Production EngineeringCyber-Physical Production Systems are widely recognized as the key to unlock the full potential benefits of the Industry 4.0 paradigm. Cyber-Physical Production Systems Design, Development and Deployment methodology is a systematic approach in assessing necessities, identifying gaps and then designing, developing and deploying solutions to fill such gaps. It aims to support and drive enterprise’s evolution to the new working environment promoted by the availability of Industry 4.0 paradigms and technologies while challenged by the need to increment a continuous improvement culture. The proposed methodology considers the different dimensions within enterprises related with their levels of organization, competencies and technology. It is a two-phased sequentially-stepped process to enable discussion, reflection/reasoning, decision-making and action-taking towards evolution. The first phase assesses an enterprise across its Organizational, Technological and Human dimensions. The second phase establishes sequential tasks to successfully deploy solutions. Is was applied to a production section at a Portuguese enterprise with the development of a new visual management system to enable shop floor management. This development is presented as an example of Industry 4.0 technology and it promotes a faster decision-making, better production management, improved data availability as well as fosters more dynamic workplaces with enhanced reactivity to problems

Digital strategy implementation in process manufacturing firms: the Sirmax case.

The elaboration aims to investigate how to effectively implement a digital strategy in process manufacturing firms. After having analyzed literature and benchmark cases, the focus is on the digital strategy implementation proposal for Sirmax, a process manufacturing firm.ope

A Competency Based MSIS Curriculum

In response to the changing industry demands and increasing diversity of student needs when embarking on IS graduate studies, we determined that a fundamental redesign of the MSIS curriculum was necessary. We saw that the expanding IT universe now has more specialties than ever before while competitive forces simultaneously demand that firms keep costs under strict controls. Facing such pressures, firms demand more from IT professionals in the breadth and depth of their IT knowledge and skills coming from numerous knowledge domains. From these trends and issues we formulated the competency concept that forms the foundation for the new curriculum. A student earns a competency by completing four courses in a module. Now students can choose to pursue multiple competencies and can return to upgrade skills after graduation. We describe the process and issues we faced as well as the competency-based modular curriculum. We end with discussing the remaining issues that we are handling

DevOps for Digital Leaders

DevOps; continuous delivery; software lifecycle; concurrent parallel testing; service management; ITIL; GRC; PaaS; containerization; API management; lean principles; technical debt; end-to-end automation; automatio

Exploring the Future Shape of Business Intelligence: Mapping Dynamic Capabilities of Information Systems to Business Intelligence Agility

A major challenge in today’s turbulent environments is to make appropriate decisions to sustainably steer an organization. Business intelligence (BI) systems are often used as a basis for decision making. But achieving agility in BI and cope with dynamic environments is no trivial endeavor as the classical, data-warehouse (DWH)-based BI is primarily used to retrospectively reflect an organization’s performance. Using an exploratory approach, this paper investigates how current trends affect the concept of BI and thus their ability to support adequate decision making. The key focus is to understand dynamic capabilities in the field of information systems (IS) and how they are connected to BI agility. We therefore map dynamic capabilities from the IS literature to agility dimensions of BI. Additionally, we propose a structural model that focusses on DWH-based BI and analyze how current BI-related trends and environmental turbulence affect the way that BI is shaped in the future