Influence of Agility on the Innovation Capability of Organizations – A Systematic Review of Influencing Factors

The increasing dynamization of markets, changing customer requirements and unpredictable occurrences pose new challenges for product development and design. Agile methods and processes can serve as a solution to secure the innovation capability of organizations in this environment. Since the areas of agility and innovation capability of organizations have mostly been treated separately in research, this research effort is focusing at hollistically collecting success factors for agility and success factors for the innovation capability of organizations and analyzing them in detail - including collecting indicators and directional characteristics. The analyzed factors are specifically focused on the development of mechatronic products and are intended to serve as a type of library that enables organizations and researchers to understand their own situation as best as possible, select appropriate recommendations for action in a targeted manner, and track their implementation / operationalization on the basis of the corresponding indicators and characteristics. This research work thus makes a contribution to sustainably increasing innovation capability and agility of industrial organizations

DESCRIPTIVE ATTRIBUTES OF ANALYSIS USE CASES IN THE DATA-DRIVEN VALIDATION OF ELEMENTS IN THE SYSTEM OF OBJECTIVES

Usage data of reference systems can be analyzed in the development process for the validation of system elements. The process model for data-driven validation of elements in the system of objectives aids developers in performing such data analyses. The conducted studies show that the basis for an efficient analysis process is a common understanding of the system and the goal of the analysis. Therefore, a template was derived over the course of case studies describing the elements in the system of objectives. The template covers the three descriptive dimensions general information, technical system and data. It allows a comprehensive description of analysis use cases. On average it takes 11 minutes for developers to aggregate all necessary information and consequently fill out the template. An A/B-Test confirmed the comprehensibility and applicability of the template even for developers of different domain knowledge. Through its contribution to a sustainable knowledge management the template provides an added value for the developers for conducting analysis

Product-Production-CoDesign: An Approach on Integrated Product and Production Engineering Across Generations and Life Cycles

Shorter product life cycles and high product variance nowadays require efficient engineering of products and production systems. Hereby a further challenge is that costs over the entire life cycle of the product and production system are defined early in the process. Existing approaches in literature and practice such as simultaneous engineering and design for manufacturing incorporate aspects of production into product engineering. However, these approaches leave potential for increasing efficiency unused because knowledge from past generations of products, production systems, and business models is not stored and reused in a formalized way and future generations are not considered in the respective current engineering process. This article proposes an approach for integrated product and production engineering across generations and life cycles of products and production systems. This includes the consideration of related business models to successfully establish the products on the market as well as the anticipation of future product and production system characteristics. The presented approach can reduce both development and manufacturing costs as well as time to market and opens the vast technological potential for product design to achieve additional customer benefits. Three case studies elaborate on aspects of the proposed approach and present its benefits