Engineering challenges of intrafirm technology reuse

Companies derive additional value from technological investments by repeatedly applying them across different product lines in their portfolios. Technology reuse strategies have helped to increase efficiency in leveraging research and development investments, but the attempts to explain how to duplicate such results for technology reuse at the engineering level are missing. While there are synergetic effects to the reuse of technologies, there are also transaction costs that limit the benefits in practice. This paper presents a model, along with three examples, of technology reuse to help account for these transaction costs and mitigate the fallacy of perceiving technologies as reusable “off‐the‐shelf” elements

A nationwide postal questionnaire survey: the presence of airway guidelines in anaesthesia department in Sweden

Background: In Sweden, airway guidelines aimed toward improving patient safety have been recommended by the Swedish Society of Anaesthesia and Intensive Care Medicine. Adherence to evidence-based airway guidelines is known to be generally poor in Sweden. The aim of this study was to determine whether airway guidelines are present in Swedish anaesthesia departments

Platform Strategies from a PLM Perspective - Theory and Practice for the Aerospace Industry

The fierce competition of today pushes companies to be more effective in developing, producing and delivering their products. Reusing knowledge, often through adopting platform based development, is recognized as a necessity to be able to compete. This paper analyzes platform approaches from a Product Lifecycle Management perspective and how well they cover the aerospace industry’s needs. A literature study gathers several different platform strategies and maps them to what is needed to be able to cover the product from cradle to grave. As a first step towards bridge the gaps, a case study at an aerospace supplier is performed, resulting in a PLM architecture for developing, configuring and verifying a Turbine Rear Structure

Introducing Design Descriptions on Different Levels of Concretisation in a Platform Definition

Product platforms has been widely accepted in industry as a means to reach both high product variety while maintaining business efficiency. For suppliers of highly customised products, however, the development of a platform based upon predefined modules is a challenge. This is due to the large differ-ences between the various systems their products are to be integrated into and the customer's individual preferences. What is common for most platform descriptions is the high level of concretisation, such as predefined modules, they are built upon, but how can companies act when that is not possible? Are there other principles that can be used for the definition of a product platform? This paper presents a concept to incorporate other types of descriptions of different levels of concretisation into a product platform. Parts of the concept has been realised in a computer support tool and tested at a case company in order to improve their quotation process.ChaS