Sustainability through the Digitalization of Industrial Machines: Complementary Factors of Fuel Consumption and Productivity for Forklifts with Sensors

Increasing the fuel efficiency of industrial machines through digitalization can enable the transport and logistics sector to overcome challenges such as low productivity growth and increasing CO2 emissions. Modern digitalized machines with embedded sensors that collect and transmit operational data have opened up new avenues for the identification of more efficient machine use. While existing studies of industrial machines have mostly focused on one or a few conditioning factors at a time, this study took a complementary approach, using a large set of known factors that simultaneously conditioned both the fuel consumption and productivity of medium-range forklifts (n = 285) that operated in a natural industrial setting for one full year. The results confirm the importance of a set of factors, including aspects related to the vehicles’ travels, drivers, operations, workload spectra, and contextual factors, such as industry and country. As a novel contribution, this study shows that the key conditioning factors interact with each other in a non-linear and non-additive manner. This means that addressing one factor at a time might not provide optimal fuel consumption, and instead all factors need to be addressed simultaneously as a system

Information Worker Productivity Enabled by IT System Usage : A Complementary-Based Approach

Assessing the conditions of productivity of individual workers who process information and use IT has been a concern for many researchers. Prior studies have applied different theoretical foundations to study the relationship between IT use and productivity at individual level in post adoption scenarios and have provided mixed results. In the last decades, the proposition that there is a need for a set of factors to be changed in a synchronized fashion when using an IT system has received particular attention. Very little, however, is known about the configurations of these factors at individual level. To investigate this gap, we have designed a new research model of an information worker’s individual productivity when a more aligned IT system is used in a synchronized manner with both individual and organizational factors. The formulated research model is grounded on the complementarity theory, functioning here as a meta-theory guiding the linking of productivity theory, Kirton’s adaption-innovation theory, and several theoretical bodies on the structure of production processes and human resource management. The formulated model was tested in two empirical studies – a longitudinal quasi-randomized field experiment and an online experiment – conducted to investigate configurations of complementary factors that increase productivity when a new, more aligned IT system is used. Overall, the two studies shed important light on configurations of complementary factors and the improvement of the research design to study their impact on IT-enabled productivity. The obtained results contribute to the research that focuses on individual information worker IT-enabled productivity as well as research that rests on the complementarity theory with new configurations of complementary factors that, when matched correctly, can increase individual productivity of information workers. Eventually, the studies presented here advocate that further research is needed to increase our in-depth understanding of complementary factors and their impact on individual IT-enabled productivity of information workers

The information sector in Denmark and Sweden : value, employment, wages

Although Denmark and Sweden are deemed digital technology leaders, their information sectors have not yet been comprehensively measured. This study bridges this gap. Data for 1990–2012 are reclassified to fit the information sector conceptual framework from prior studies. The analyses examine sector economic value added, share of workers, share of the wage bill, and productivity ratios. These countries’ information sectors are compared with those of the United States and South Korea. Novel results include the counterintuitive indication that Denmark's sector differs from Sweden's, with the latter's being closer to South Korea's. The information sector dominates both economies, although Sweden's seems more productive than Denmark's

Swedish Information Economy : A Preliminary Account

The recent developments and adoptions of digital technologies give rise to the growth of information economies, understood as an aggregate of economic activities that produce informational outputs. Several key characteristics of an information economy differ to the conventional economic wisdom derived from the industrial age, which may impose governmental policy implications and therefore constitutes a key question: how to govern the newly emerged information economy with the thinking of the industrial age economy. Resolving this problem requires, among others, comprehensive understanding of information economies. To that end, Sweden is among the most advanced adopters of digital technologies and represents therefore a suitable empirical base for the investigation of an information economy. This paper offers preliminary results from a first ever account of the Swedish information economy in terms of its value created, jobs and wages; this account shows that the Swedish economy is dominated by its information economy, which requires a careful attention of policy makers

Complementarities of knowledge worker productivity : Insights from an online experiment of software programmers with innovative cognitive style.

The literature has been inconclusive regarding which factors determine knowledge worker productivity. To remedy that gap, this paper presented an online experiment to measure the productivity of software programmers, as a representative of knowledge workers, in a particular situation when a more aligned with the work process IT system is used. The assumed research model was based on the systems approach of complementarity theory and combined the following factors: worker's cognitive style, work process, decision-making authority, worker training mode, and worker incentive. The experiment was conducted for 4 months and attracted 110 participants with innovative cognitive style from two crowdsourcing platforms. The results demonstrate that complementarities condition the productivity of a knowledge worker. More specifically, the learning effect is crucial for productivity gains and should be considered in further detail in the design of new studies. The paper's key contribution is the test of a unique configuration of two systems of complementary factors, because most of the literature has investigated only the impact of particular factors in isolation

Methodological Insights From two Experimental Studies Into Complementarities of Productive IT use

Numerous studies have attempted to determine factors that condition the IT-enabled productivity of information workers but have not yet arrived at a comprehensive conclusion. A so-called complementarity systems approach has been proposed recently, holding that a number of factors need to be managed in a deliberately synchronized manner in order to generate productivity gains from such workers. However, this proposal does not provide specifications for how such synchronization must be conducted and researched. To remedy this gap, this research conducts two parallel and differently designed studies: a longitudinal quasi-randomized field experiment and a well-controlled online experiment. Regarded jointly, each study offers insights into the investigated phenomenon that the other does not, indicating that both studies complement each other. In particular, these two different research approaches to study the complementarities of productive IT use help us to establish how further research design should be developed to investigate individual productivity when a new, more aligned IT system in a company is used together with complementary factors. Moreover, the results from both studies jointly demonstrate that a mandatory context of IT use might provide better access to individuals with both adaptive and innovative cognitive styles than a voluntary working environment. Finally, both studies demonstrate that more detailed research is needed to understand how the productivity of individuals differs when inappropriate cognitive styles are included in complementarity set-ups. Therefore, the two studies offer new insights into the interplay between the studied factors that condition the productivity of information workers and show the importance of analysing a complex phenomenon with multiple, different, and complementary research designs, as each design has inherent conditions with opportunities and limitations, in order to reveal characteristics about the phenomenon being investigated

SOFTWARE PROGRAMMER PRODUCTIVITY: A COMPLEMENTARY-BASED RESEARCH MODE

The identification of the factors that condition a software programmer’s productivity remains a key challenge for both scholars and practitioners. While a number of studies have focused on the impact of one or a few particular factors, the way these factors jointly condition programmer productivity is still unknown. This paper presents a conceptual model aimed at a comprehensive understanding of the factors that complement each other to govern the productivity of a software programmer. The model is based on complementarity theory and its systems approach and addresses an individual worker’s productivity, which accounts for cognitive, technological, and organizational characteristics. The analyzed factors are organized into a system of complementarities, offering two propositions that specify the conditions of a programmer’s productivity. The model’s key contribution lies in its unique configuration of two systems of complementarities, which have the potential to add to the literature on the productivity of software programmers. The proposed model can be employed as a guidance for the design of empirical investigations of the conditions of individual software programmers’ productivity as well as information worker productivity in general

COMPLEMENTARITIES OF EFFECTIVE INDIVIDUAL IT USE : PRELIMINARY RESULTS

This paper presents preliminary results from an ongoing empirical study that seeks to understand the relationship between IT-complementary factors and the individual productivity of information workers. Although there is substantial evidence of positive IT complementarity effects on productivity at macro-, meso-, and micro-levels of the economy, we still lack knowledge on the configuration of these factors at the individual level. To investigate this gap, we have designed a new research model of an information worker’s individual productivity when an IT system is used jointly and synchronously with both individual and organizational factors. The model is tested in a longitudinal field study of sales operations of an international pharmaceutical company with a multi sub-case set-up. While we continue to collect data, preliminary findings from difference-in-difference analysis are presented here and demonstrate that the introduction of a “full” set of IT complementarities has had a positive and significant effect on the number of sales calls performed

Smart Product-Service Systems (Smart PSS) in Industry Firms : A Literature Review

During the last few decades, the PSS literature has documented industrial firms' transformation from the product dominant logic of business to product-service bundles constituted by machines and related services. This transformation has had several dramatic implications on firms' profitability, strategy, operations, organizational setting, sales and marketing approaches, and R&D practices. However, more recently, industrial firms have started to adopt various smart technologies that are embedded within the PSS. The use of smart technologies in PSS gives rise to the new types of PSS that are referred to in this paper as Smart PSS. Based on a literature review of 43 papers from relevant academic fields, this paper seeks answer to the following research question: what are the value creating features of smart product service systems (Smart PSS) in industrial firms? We synthesize the knowledge on Smart PSS to provide a definition and show the distinctive features of Smart PSS and propose an agenda for future research