PLM implementation guidelines – relevance and application in practice: a discussion of findings from a retrospective case study

In this paper, a recently conducted product lifecycle management (PLM) implementation project is analysed. The aims are to investigate whether published product lifecycle management (PLM) implementation guidelines are relevant to and used in practice, and, if so, to assess how useful they are for guiding project execution. This paper presents an examination of how a real PLM implementation project was conducted, mapping out the rationale for different courses of action and the effects they had. This paper evaluates the degree of relevance and application of existing PLM implementation guidelines. It is found that while most of the guidelines were highly relevant to the project, they were not applied in full. Potential reasons for why the guidelines are not followed are discussed. It is suggested that projects review their plans with the guidelines in mind, evaluating their degree of relevance and including a plan for how to apply the guidelines

Nästa generations syn på skogsägandet och skogsägarrörelsen

The future of the forest owners’ associations are intimately coupled to the development in family forestry. Forecasts have been made that predicts that the number of forest properties for sale on the open market will increase as the interest among the children of the property owners is considered to decrease. The associations are also affected by continuing individualism in the society which may affect attitudes to as well as interest in membership. The objective of this study was to study the attitudes among grown-up children of members in a forest owners association towards overtaking the forest property as well as membership in a forest owners association. The study focused on grown-up children who were between 30 and 50 years old. To reach them, 800 members between 55 and 70 years old were contacted to gather contact information to their children. After random sampling among siblings to 384 members who provided such information (only one child per member was included in the study), 299 usable answers were gathered using a telephone questionnaire. The majority of the children that answered the questionnaire were between 30 and 35 years old. The proportion of children who today were interested to take over their parents’ property (77.3 %) was comparable to the proportion of today’s forest owners that have acquired their property within their family. Women were significantly less interested to take over their parents’ property. The proportion of children interested to take over the property together with their siblings (43.7 %) was higher than the present proportion of properties that were share-owned. Children who helped their parents with the practical management were significantly more interested to take over their parents’ property. The children were well-acquainted with the forest owners association and three out of four children were interested to become a member, or were already a member, if they were to take over their parents’ property. However, half of the children did not have knowledge of the values of the forest owner association which may imply that the recruitment of members willing to lead the association in the future might become more difficult than it is today

Pharmaceutical product modularization as a mass customization strategy to increase patient benefit cost-efficiently

Customized pharmaceutical products aim to comply with the individual needs of a patient to enhance the treatment outcome. The current pharmaceutical production paradigm is, however, dominated by mass production, where the pharmaceutical products embrace a one-size-fits-all design with a low possibility of treatment optimization to patient needs. This production paradigm is not designed or intended for customized pharmaceutical products and operating this production context for customized pharmaceutical products is argued to be cost-inefficient. To address this challenge of inefficient production of customized pharmaceutical products, this study proposes an approach to modular pharmaceutical product design. As a mass customization strategy, product modularization enables serving customers with customized products cost-efficiently. The proposed modular pharmaceutical products integrate three product design requirements originating from patient needs: a scalable dose strength, a flexible target release profile, and a scalable treatment size. An approach to assess the value of these product designs is presented, by means of proposing three benefit metrics complying with respective design requirements and a cost metric assessing the cost of producing these modular pharmaceutical product designs. Results suggest that pharmaceutical product modularization can, by keeping the number of produced components low, substantially increase the external product variety and, hence, enhance the treatment outcome of patients. Fur-thermore, results indicate that the achieved benefit for the patient through product modularization increases beyond additional costs arising during production. However, a careful modularization must be performed to optimize the tradeoff between the increased benefit and cost

DESIGN FOR LONGEVITY - A FRAMEWORK TO SUPPORT THE DESIGNING OF A PRODUCT\u27S OPTIMAL LIFETIME

Extending the lifespan of products and parts is seen as a solution in the transition towards a circular economy. There are many proposed design approaches argued to facilitate this. However, extending the lifespan of products and parts is not always desirable, and product developers should instead strive to design for a specific longevity; the product\u27s optimal lifetime. The latter in turn depends on many various contextual factors, and this paper has identified the three main contextual factors as; the user, the business, and the resource efficiency. Considering these three appropriately can help product developers to define their product\u27s optimal lifetime. Altogether, these components promote the mindset of Design for Longevity. Specifically, as extracted from this paper: “Design for Longevity aims at designing products with an optimal lifetime, where optimal means taking the user, the business and the resource efficiency perspectives into account when designing the life of a product”. A Design for Longevity framework is proposed and evaluated in this paper, and it is concluded that the proposed Design for Longevity framework can support product developers to implement the Design for Longevity mindset

You Need To Focus To Validate

Many research students find challenges when validating their research. Especially when they have expectations to contribute to both practice and the research body of knowledge. This paper argues that a key to successful validation of design research lies in the ability to focus on what to validate in advance of how to validate. The paper provide a set of guidelines to support a discussion on how to converge to a claim that actually can be validated. The paper reports on experiences from PhD level course on validation in design research

Lessons learned from the application of enhanced Function-Means modelling

Although well researched and praised in academic publications, function modelling (FM) does not\ua0have gained much traction in industrial application. To investigate into possible reasons for this,\ua0this publication researches literature of nine different projects where enhanced function-means modelling has been applied. The projects are analysed for their purpose of FM-use, applied\ua0benefits and discovered challenges of the FM approach. From this, the main challenges for FM\ua0application are the abstraction level of the modelling language as well as the lack of an interface to\ua0CAD modelling