Climbing the Maturity Ladder in Industry 4.0: A Framework for Diagnosis and Action that Combines National and Sectorial Strategies

We present a framework to assist Industry 4.0 initiatives at countrywide and sector-specific levels. It was created using design-science research in the context of non-metal mineral industry - ceramic, glass, stone, and nanomaterials. Our findings suggest that (1) existing maturity models for Industry 4.0 do not fit all industrial contexts; (2) their use can be discouraging for small and medium-size enterprises planning digital strategies; (3) Industry 4.0 technologies should be considered as prescriptive solutions rather than descriptive dimensions, and (4) it is possible and desirable to consider Industry 4.0 maturity as a co-evolutionary growth of digital services and processes within supply chains. Our proposal provides staged and continuous representations of maturity that can be tailored for each industry. Maturity models can be a prime communication tool for managers and technology providers. Our contribution supports the European efforts to succeed in the Fourth Industrial Revolution, shared by millions of industries worldwide

Envolvimento parental na participação desportiva das crianças : Opinião dos pais sobre o seu envolvimento na prática dos filhos

Nos últimos 20 anos a investigação tem dado mostras da relevância do suporte parental durante o desenrolar desportivo da criança. Neste sentido, o presente estudo tem como principal objetivo avaliar o envolvimento parental na prática desportiva das crianças, mais especificamente no futebol. A amostra foi selecionada em três clubes da cidade de Castelo Branco, sendo constituída por 110 indivíduos de ambos os géneros, com idades compreendidas entre os 31 e 52 anos. Nesta investigação foi utilizado como instrumento de recolha de dados, um questionário adaptado ao contexto desportivo e traduzido para a realidade portuguesa por Teques (2009). Os resultados indicam que os pais apresentam elevados índices de envolvimento parental na prática desportiva dos seus filhos. Relativamente à variável género os resultados demostraram existir diferenças estatisticamente significativas na dimensão Atividades parentais (DIM_10). Quanto ao escalão de formação das crianças, os pais dos traquinas manifestam diferenças estatisticamente significativas na dimensão Perceção parental das invocações oriundas do treinador (DIM_2). Por último a variável habilitações literárias apresenta resultados estatisticamente significativos na dimensão Perceção parental do tempo e energia (DIM_7), onde os pais com habilitações superiores têm um maior envolvimento comparativamente aos pais com habilitações não superiores.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Um processo de injeção de plásticos: melhoria do programa de controlo estatístico

O presente artigo resulta de um projeto de investigação que aborda a melhoria de um programa de controlo estatístico de um processo de injeção de plásticos, tendo por base a aplicação das ferramentas básicas da qualidade, nomeadamente a análise de Pareto, o diagrama de Ishikawa e os gráficos de controlo. Paralelamente às ferramentas básicas da qualidade, foi também utilizada a metodologia Análise ao Sistema de Medida (Measurement Systems Analysis), com recurso ao software Minitab. A metodologia empregue neste projeto foi o estudo de caso

Towards a Business Process Quality Culture: From High-Level Guidelines to Grassroots Actions

We present an information systems development (ISD) approach to integrate quality culture in business processes. Action research is our mode of inquiry and a company from the food industry provides the setting. Food production involves auditing throughout the supply chain and a demanding information system, with numerous goals and rules grounded on the organizational policies and values. However, there is a lack of holistic process-oriented approaches to leverage a quality culture. This paper provides a contribution, with the ISO2 approach, offering a set of artifacts to support the ISD lifecycle. An audit from a food retail group confirmed the positive outcome of its use, internalizing quality principles while developing the IS, and it is planning to suggest its adoption by their network of food suppliers

Getting Around to It: How Design Science Researchers Set Future Work Agendas

Background: There is a long tradition of writing about future work in research papers, and information systems design science research (IS DSR) is no exception. However, there is a lack of studies on (1) how IS DSR authors currently envision the next steps for their work and (2) guidelines to improve the communication of opportunities to accumulate knowledge. Method: This paper contributes to this topic, building on a systematic literature review of 123 IS DSR papers published between 2018 and 2022. Results: Design-oriented research requires the research team to decide which tasks to carry out immediately in building the future and which to postpone as research debt. The paper\u27s contribution is threefold. First, we propose a research debt lifecycle to support (1) project stakeholders, (2) IS DSR community, and (3) societies looking for better futures. Second, we discuss the anatomy of future work in recent IS DSR. Finally, we suggest guidelines to manage and report the next research steps. Conclusion: This paper presents a pioneering assessment of future work suggestions in the IS field, focusing on the design science research paradigm. Future work directions emerge from researchers\u27 choices during the IS DSR process that must be continuously managed

A STRATEGIC VIEW ON INTERTWINING DIGITAL AND PHYSICAL MATERIALITIES ACROSS LIFECYCLES OF PRODUCTS AND SERVICES

Opportunities to use virtual, augmented, and mixed reality (VAM-R) are emerging in various sectors of the economy. To seize them, managers need to develop comprehensive strategies that intertwine digital and physical forms of materiality. This paper proposes a way to assess and steer the transformations of the reality-virtuality continuum across lifecycles of products and services. Our approach identifies use cases for VAM-R according to the (1) strategic imperative, (2) physical materiality, (3) reality-virtuality assessment, (4) digital materiality, (5) information value, and (6) project portfolio. The findings result from three action research cycles in manufacturing and healthcare. For theory, we propose a framework to evaluate the reality-virtuality continuum and guide VAM-R transformations. For practice, we propose and test an artefact accessible to domain experts with different backgrounds, and a sequence of steps to assist managers in their digitalization strategies with VAM-R. Lifecycle approaches offer an alternative perspective to situational transformation, potentially improving the pervasiveness of organizational changes using information technologies

Solar radiation prediction using wavelet decomposition

Nowadays, a substantial part of the agricultural production takes place in greenhouses, which enable to tune the crop growing by modifying, artificially, the environmental conditions and the plant’s nutrition. The main goal is to optimise the balance between the production economic return and the operation costs of the climate actuators. Severe environment and market restrictions jointly with an increasing tendency of the fuel price motivate the development of more “intelligent” energy regulators. In order to formulate the best options for a production plan, this type of artificial supervisors must be able to formulate close predictions on a large set of variables. Considering, for instance, the air temperature control inside a greenhouse, the system must be able to close predict the evolution of the solar radiation since this is the exogenous variable which most influences the thermal load during the day. In this paper, an artificial neural network, in conjunction with a wavelet decomposition strategy, is used for forecasting, an hour ahead, the instantaneous solar radiation energy density sampled at one minute interval. The results obtained from this work encourage further exploitation of this kind of signal processing techniqu

From relational ClassSheets to UML+OCL

Spreadsheets are among the most popular programming languages in the world. Unfortunately, spreadsheet systems were not tailored from scratch with modern programming language features that guarantee, as much as possible, program correctness. As a consequence, spreadsheets are populated with unacceptable amounts of errors. In other programming language settings, model-based approaches have been proposed to increase productivity and program efectiveness. Within spreadsheets, this approach has also been followed, namely by ClassSheets. In this paper, we propose an extension to ClassSheets to allow the specification of spreadsheets that can be viewed as relational databases. Moreover, we present a transformation from ClassSheet models to UML class diagrams enriched with OCL constraints. This brings to the spreadsheet realm the entire paraphernalia of model validation techniques that are available for UML.(undefined