Acceptance Modelling in Product Development – Case Study: Connected Systems for Industry 4.0 Solutions

Within Industry 4.0 many connected systems are entering production to optimize the processes. The integration of the manual workstations into a Smart Factory, as a fully connected production, is required as well. Therefore, systems with which the production workers interact as users are introduced. However, as a side-effect, the production employees and their working performance are more transparent as well. This often leads to a lack of user acceptance, even though these systems have positive effects on complete production processes. If, for unforeseen reasons, there is a lack of user acceptance, the introduced system will not be as successful as planned, irrespective of how technically valuable the future product is. Therefore, the potential user acceptance towards the System-in-Development should be understood. This contribution introduces an acceptance model that has been developed and validated within a Live-Lab with industrial participation, as a research environment between laboratory and field studies. For this purpose, influencing factors for user acceptance of connected products were identified. Based on various scientific surveys, the factors were weighted and their interactions analysed in order to enable prognosis regarding user acceptance and to derive recommendations concerning actions for the downstream processes

The positive impact of agile retrospectives on the collaboration of distributed development teams – A practical approach on the example of Bosch engineering GmbH

To counteract competitive pressure, increasing customer requirements and growing product complexity successful distributed collaboration in product development is vital. Companies have to face new challenges, such as efficiency losses in communication. To overcome these challenges agile working practices, such as agile retrospectives, could be beneficial. The objective of this scientific work is to evaluate the benefit of agile working practices on the example of agile retrospectives, for the improvement of collaboration in distributed development teams. Based on literature analysis, qualitative and quantitative expert interviews following the DRM by Blessing and Chakrabarti, this scientific work shows that agile working practices have a high potential to improve distributed collaboration. To address this potential, several virtual agile retrospectives are developed and conducted within a distributed team at Bosch Engineering GmbH. The evaluation of this approach results in a high potential of agile retrospectives indicating an improvement tendency. Especially iteratively implemented virtual agile retrospectives have a positive impact on successful distributed collaboration

Agile Method Development: A Live-Lab Case Study on Product Properties for Process Planning

Developing design methods can be described as a process similar to product development processes.Following agile approaches is worthwhile in order to identify relevant requirements of potential users at early stages of method's maturity. Live-Labs, as a controllable research environment located between laboratory and field studies, provide an environment whose results are neither too specific nor too generic. In this paper, an agile development of a method for process planning depending on product attributes is presented. The research took place in a Live-Lab with industrial participation