A capacity management tool for a portfolio of industrialization projects

The management of a project portfolio is a complex decision process because it encompasses the achievement of multiple objectives. A critical point that increases the complexity in the decision-making process of a portfolio manager is the allocation of human resources to manage the projects of the portfolio, project managers, which is crucial to the organization’s performance. In this case, the project manager can manage more than one project simultaneously and it is necessary to assign project managers to the projects, considering that project activities have an amount of work to be accomplished. The main objective of this work was to provide support for this capacity management problem, which aims to provide an easier decision-making process for the capacity management of an industrialization project portfolio. Therefore, it was developed: a hybrid model that creates a schedule respecting the resource constraints and the established due dates; a recommendation system that considers project managers’ allocation and projects requirements; and, an automatic status report that allows identifying the project portfolio capacity usage.This work is supported by: European Structural and Investment Funds in the FEDER component, through the Operational Competitiveness and Internationalization Programme (COMPETE 2020) [Project nº 39479; Funding Reference: POCI-01-0247-FEDER-39479]

Intra-Firm and Inter-Firm Challenges in Servitization Ecosystem: Experiences from Five Product-Centric Firms in Different Industries

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the challenges in the servitization journey of product-centric firms from an ecosystem perspective, considering both intra-firm and inter-firm levels. Prior research addresses the challenges of servitization in many sectors from different perspectives. However, the majority of studies primarily focus on the provider of an offering. There is a lack of in-depth studies on analysing servitization challenges from the broader set of network actors including customers, suppliers, and sub-suppliers at the intra-firm and inter-firm levels. A multiple case study method was used to analyse five product-centric firms from different industries that were engaged in servitization. At intrafirm level, our analysis shows that ‘coordination’ is a major challenge for the provider, supplier, and sub-suppliers, and that ‘uncertainty’ and ‘risk’ is a major challenge for the provider, customer, and supplier. At inter-firm level, ‘partnership management’ found to be a most significant challenge for provider, customer, supplier, and sub-suppliers. The study contributes to the discussion of the relational view approach for servitization research

Experience feedback using social media : from the product lifecycle phases to the design practices

Many companies have been using lessons learned practices as one oftheir key knowledge management initiatives to capitalize on past experiences.For product development companies, learning from product lifecycle phasesgives a true competitive advantage to improve the next generation of products.However, companies are still struggling in capturing and sharing lessonslearned and applying them in new situations. Based on this consideration, thepaper proposes a video-based approach–using social media technologies–as away to leverage continuous capturing and sharing lessons learned from productlifecycle phases to design practices. The paper presents the findings of a casestudy within the aerospace industry, which investigates the current industrialpractices with regard to experience feedback, and illustrates the implementationof a video-based approach. Further, the conceptual mock-up of video-based lessons learned sharing portal and its social platform that are aimed to support the design practices are illustrated