Development of technology and service thinking for technical personnel: Action research at a Japanese monitor maker

The importance of services within technology-based business in terms of customer value is increasingly well-understood by manufacturing companies. Manufacturing companies are trying to restructure their business models by adding the concept of service that is required to make a process of value co-creation with customers. Human resources are a core factor in the implementation of this notion in the practical field. In a technology-based business, technical personnel must have not only technology-oriented thinking but also service-oriented thinking in order to generate new value propositions. In this work, we propose an approach to transform the way of thinking and support knowledge co-creation with others with a focus on new corporate value propositions. We combined a service innovation chart with a business model thinking methodology to create a new approach intended for the development of technology and service thinking within technical personnel. Our objective is to help manufacturing companies create a service climate and clarify the knowledge co-creation process. We conducted action research by introducing our approach to 25 technical personnel employed by a Japanese monitor maker and obtained data including feedback on its usability and the impact on corporate business models. The findings of this study will help personnel to generate technology and service-based innovation concepts, thereby promoting servitization in technology-based companies.     

Software project initiation and planning - an empirical study

This study describes a study of 14 software companies, on how they initiate and pre-plan software projects. The aim was to obtain an indication of the range of planning activities carried out. The study, using a convenience sample, was carried out using structured interviews, with questions about early software project planning activities. The study offers evidence that an iterative and incremental development process presents extra difficulties in the case of fixed-contract projects. The authors also found evidence that feasibility studies were common, but generally informal in nature. Documentation of the planning process, especially for project scoping, was variable. For incremental and iterative development projects, an upfront decision on software architecture was shown to be preferred over allowing the architecture to just 'emerge'. There is also evidence that risk management is recognised but often performed incompletely. Finally appropriate future research arising from the study is described.     

Development of a service evolution map for service design through application of text mining to service documents

As digital convergence has proliferated and products have become smarter, various service concepts have emerged based on the capabilities of products. It has become a main concern to illuminate historical changes and status of service concepts according to the utilisation of product elements to provide valuable information for service development. However, a lacuna still remains in the literature regarding a systematic and quantitative approach on this problem. This study proposes a service evolution map as a tool for analysing the evolutionary paths of service concepts based on the utilisation of product elements. The proposed service evolution map consists of two layers with the time dimension: a product element layer for the utilisation of product elements and a service concept layer for the evolutionary paths of service concepts. Based on the service documents describing what the services are, text mining, co-word analysis, and modified formal concept analysis are employed to develop the product element and service concept layers, respectively. A case study of mobile application services is presented to illustrate the proposed approach. This study is expected to be a basis of future research on the interaction between products and services and service concept design based on the creative utilisation of product elements.     

Bibliometric analysis - A new business area for information professionals in libraries?

Supplying library users with literature by a seamless linking of media is the goal of (scientific) libraries. By the digitization of primary and secondary data and the convergence of products and providers, libraries have already come very close to achieving this ideal. A digital library is the realization of this goal. However, many librarians are in danger of running out of imagination. What will come after the digital library? Will information professionals still be needed? What services can libraries offer? Bibliometric analysis is an example of new business areas in libraries. This paper will discuss what shape this service could take in practice, who needs it and what target groups exist in the scientific environment. Concrete examples of bibliometric analysis from the Central Library of Research Centre Jülich will round off the overview.     

Workflow re-engineering of design-build projects using a BIM tool

The use of design-build delivery methods and building information modeling (BIM) tools in the construction industry has been growing rapidly in recent years due to the increasing demand for more efficient construction project management. The successful implementation of these?tools by engineering firms on projects, however, is still not being achieved consistently. This paper shares the experiences of the implementation of an in-house BIM tool by a large engineering, procurement, and construction firm that has an extensive reputation for design-build projects. A new workflow was proposed that takes full advantage of the BIM tool to both enhance the construction management performance and to minimize the impact on the firm’s existing workflow. The development of a new workflow was conducted by interviewing key personnel in various departments of the firm and by carefully examining probable impacts of the BIM tool’s introduction into the firm’s business processes.     

An optimization-based productivity improvement incentive system

Incentives and productivity improvement (PI) are intertwined. Often, we ask what incentive program should be introduced to achieve a certain level of PI, and what is its minimal cost; or conversely, for a given incentive program, what is the maximum achievable PI? Incentives can be extended to any combination of customers, management, production staff, sales staff, and delivery staff, among others. What is the share of each of these segments in the incentive program and what is the yield for such a program in terms of productivity improvement? The answers to these questions and others are the subject of this paper.

Relations between incentives of the various segments of the operation, productivity improvement, costs and earnings are determined. These relations are then used to model the problem as a nonlinear program. The solution of the model provides answers to the above questions. The solution enables us to distribute some of the extra earnings, generated from the resulting PI, among the parties contributing to productivity improvement. This method has been applied to the operation of a firm specialized in the production of ready-mixed concrete.     

Characterising product-service systems in the healthcare industry

Since the 1970s, marketing and innovation management communities have been investigating how to incorporate customer-desired functions into new product and service designs. These wide-ranging enquiries have shed light on the impact of lead-user engagement in new product development, demonstrated ways to examine service production and delivery, such as the use of ‘line of visibility’ in service blueprints and the modelling of ‘service encounters’, and have created new terms such as ‘value co-creation’. Despite these efforts, recent reviews have identified the lack of an holistic approach to new product-service system (PSS) development. This deficiency needs to be rectified, especially for complex PSS developments in regulated industries such as healthcare, as often there are multiple stakeholders posing conflicting priorities to the development team.This paper describes a novel PSS characterisation approach that supports the early-stage new PSS development process. The approach is originated from eleven healthcare case studies, involving twenty-five new products, services and PSSs. Following the methodology of action research, further cases are selected for the application of the approach to a new product, service or PSS concept in facilitated workshops. Initial implications of employing this approach in three cases are discussed in this paper.     

Brittleness,fracture energy and size effect in theory and in reality

It is natural that, with the recent fast development of fracture mechanics, the meanings of some standard expressions such as brittleness, fracture energy and size effect need to be revised in order to avoid serious misunderstandings and ambiguities. The paper aims at answering such ticklish questions as the following. Can Griffith's criterion for quasi-static crack propagation, which is valid in linear-elastic fracture mechanics, be applied to the non-linear stress softening theory called the fictitious crack model? What is in fact the mutual relationship of the two theories? How can brittleness be distinctly defined? What is a brittle material and what does quasi-brittle mean? Is the fracture toughness a measure of toughness or rather a measure of strength? Is the fracture energy a material parameter and can a material parameter be ‘measured’ directly or must a theory always be used for interpreting results from experiments? What is the fundamental idea of damage mechanics? What does size effect mean? Is a size-effect law the same as a model law derived from dimensional analysis? What is in fact the relation of a model law to the theory (known or unknown) to which the model law is connected? Giving replies to such questions it is essential to distinguish between theory and reality and not to mix two or more theories, unless the mutual relations of the theories involved are taken into account.     

The funding crisis: implications for the survival of human service institutions

At a time when human service providers should be priming their technologies to meet the emerging needs of a new age, they appear to be fighting for their very survival. New governmental priorities have reduced the Welfare State to a new level of pauperism, where both public and private services scurry for scarce resources. In the midst of these changes, serious questions emerge regarding who is ultimately responsible. That is, for maintaining acceptable standards of human dignity and rights despite government preoccupation with budget-balancing. Traditional advocates in the form of civil rights community organizations and organized labor groups do not appear to be available for the task. And recent changes in conventional primary group systems such as the family and the neighborhood complicate the matter of identifying appropriate leaders for mobilizing any form of "grass roots" movement. Despite what appears to be a bleak future for the human services, there is little question about their survival. The issue is, in what form and at what level of quality will they survive. If current trends continue, they will most certainly be incapable of meeting even basic human needs in the future. Funding in its current form may be a moot issue. Ultimately, it may be those who are dependent upon service systems who will determine their own survival.     

Design as a discipline

One of the principal assumptions behind the launching of this new journal is that Design can be identified as a subject in its own right, independent of the various areas in which it is applied to parctical effect. The Editorial Board is therefore proposing to publish a series of papers by leading members of the international ‘invisible college’ of Design Studies, which will aim to establish the theoretical bases for treating Design as a coherent discipline of study in its own right.The questions or issues that these papers are expected to address include: Can design be a discipline in its own right? If so, what are its distinguishing features? (What are the kind of features that distinguish any discipline?) To what questions should the discipline address itself — in both research and teaching? What methodology does it use? What results — what applications — should it be trying to achieve?To start the series we are publishing two contributions by Bruce Archer. The first is a short statement prepared specially for this first issue of Design Studies by Professor Archer, entitled Whatever Became of Design Methodology? The second is an extract from a lecture delivered by Professor Archer at the Manchester Regional Centre for Science and Technology on 7 May 1976, under the title The Three Rs. This latter paper argues not only tha Design should be regarded as a fundamental aspect of education (in no sense a specialized subject) but that Design is (or should be) on a par with and distinct from science and the humanities.Bruce Archer is Professor of Design Research at the Royal College of Art, London, where he is also Chairman of The Faculty of Theoretical Studies, Head of The Department of Design Research and Head of The Design Education Unit. He is a member of The Editorial Advisory Board of Design Studies.     

Physician participation in quality management. Expanding the goals of peer review to detect both practitioner and system error.

BACKGROUND: The goals of peer review are to improve the quality of medical care and to provide fair review of individual practitioner actions, judged against the local standard of medical care. A new system for conducting peer review was evaluated which included in every case a root cause analysis to identify latent system flaws and a consideration of performance improvement projects to remedy these flaws. METHODS: The peer review committee of the medical service in a tertiary care, affiliated Department of Veterans Affairs Medical Center, which conducted the evaluation, was familiar with the local standards of care and the systems issues relevant to each case. Four questions were answered for each case: Was the quality of care less than ideal? If so, was the practitioner negligent? What system flaws contributed to the error or to the severity of injury? How could the system flaws be eliminated? RESULTS: Compared with the prior method of peer review, expanding the scope of review identified four times as many system problems (in 46% of cases versus 11%) without changing the incidence of finding provider negligence (21% preintervention versus 25% postintervention). Performance improvement projects were generated in 36 of 89 of these cases during the three-year period. DISCUSSION: Expanding the scope of peer review to include both root cause analysis and performance improvement thinking increased the detection of latent system flaws and the number of performance improvement projects without compromising the peer review committee's ability to identify negligence.     

Objective Project Assignment in an Industrial Engineering Organization

In general, an IE activity within a firm is characterized by resources which may be structured several ways and work activities or projects to which the resources must be allocated. The manager of such an activity is usually required periodically to define and schedule the work he has programmed his organization to engage in for some future finite planning horizon. To accomplish this, the manager must address himself to the problems of selecting an organizational structure, selecting which projects to engage in, and allocating and scheduling his resources to the selected projects. It is in the best interests of the firm that the problems be resolved in an objective manner so as to maximize some selected measure of return to the firm. A mathematical model of this decision process is formulated and then decomposed into a series of subproblems which are cycled through in a circumstantial manner to obtain the optimal solution.     

Aligning marketing and manufacturing strategies with the market

In strategic marketing decisions substantial emphasis is placed on market segmentation and product/service differentiation. This follows from separate, intensive analyses of customers and competitors. Based on these analyses, the resultant segmentation and differentiation schema, and an intensive review of the firm's own strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats, the firm makes one of its most important and critical decisions: which customers to serve and which products to emphasize, referred to as positioning. On the other side of the same corporate coin, manufacturing makes decisions on process and infrastructure investments based upon the technologies required, and its perception of what it needs to do well in order to fulfil its role. In the same way as with marketing decisions, the firm now makes another of its most critical decisions by committing itself to major investments in manufacturing that are characterized by high value and long time scales to change. On the one hand, these positioning decisions by marketing invariably include little emphasis in determining the customer requirements that must be supported by manufacturing, and fail to investigate the ability of manufacturing to support these requirements. On the other hand, manufacturing decisions do not reflect key insights on the needs of current and future markets. As a consequence, many businesses fail to achieve their strategic business objectives, due, in part, to the inability of marketing and manufacturing to jointly develop consistent strategies. We call this a lack of alignment. The methodology outlined in this paper concerns how to align marketing and manufacturing strategies by using markets as the center piece of both developments. Doing this highlights the recognition that markets need to form the common denominator of both marketing and manufacturing strategy development. This methodology is illustrated by using an actual example drawn from plant-based research. Several key questions are addressed in this methodology. How does marketing view customers and markets? What is manufacturing's view of the same customers and markets? To what extent is manufacturing actually able to support the demands that these customers and markets are placing on a firm's capabilities? It is important to check with the use of data, the actual operating performance against the required capabilities. In cases where substantial differences exist between customer and market requirements and manufacturing capabilities, strategic options (both in marketing and manufacturing) to resolve these differences need to be addressed in making strategic business decisions.     

A Standard for the Commissioning Process

The demand for commissioning services for new-building construction projects is experiencing rapid growth. Commissioning (Cx) is touted as being a quality-focused process for ensuring the owner’s project requirements (OPR) are met by design, final construction, and the operations of a building. To an owner this is just what is needed to receive a perfect building at occupancy. However, as many owners have realized, the Cx process does not guarantee the completed building will be what was expected. It should be pointed out that this is typically not caused by the Cx process, but the Cx process should or could have identified, in the early phases of the project, many of the issues that made it through to the completed building. There are a number of reasons why the Cx services received may not be optimal. Often it is poor communication and the transfer of knowledge between project teams. Cx should and can facilitate both communication and the transfer of knowledge from phase to phase. An adaptation of the quality function deployment (QFD) four-phase model can accomplish this by filling the gaps among the major Cx activities and provide a standard approach to the process. The four-phase model effectively links each of the Cx activities to each other and back to the OPR, providing a method for improved communication and knowledge transfer. This paper investigates some potential reasons for inconsistent Cx services, presents an argument for the need of a Cx standard, and proposes a potential standard.     

基于价值共创的乡村垃圾分类服务设计研究

目的 以乡村振兴背景下乡村生态环境建设为目标,探索价值共创介入乡村垃圾分类服务系统设计的创新方法。方法 通过文献分析价值共创的内涵,阐述价值共创介入公共服务事业的影响因素,得出价值共创乡村垃圾分类服务的必要性及服务设计要素;运用用户画像和用户旅程地图挖掘用户需求痛点,利用服务蓝图和服务系统图构建设计方案。结果 基于价值共创理论梳理乡村垃圾分类过程,得出价值共创下乡村垃圾分类具有经济价值、功能价值、社会价值和生态价值;基于能力、交互、目的和媒介四个维度对各阶段展开设计要素分析。最后基于用户调研得出设计策略,输出分类服务平台、公共设施等设计方案。结论 价值共创介入乡村垃圾分类让村民积极参与分类的同时,其他利益相关者都能获得相应的价值体验,为乡村垃圾分类服务系统的创新设计提供了新的思路和方法。     

Light,the universe and everything – 12 Herculean tasks for quantum cowboys and black diamond skiers

Abstract

The Winter Colloquium on the Physics of Quantum Electronics (PQE) has been a seminal force in quantum optics and related areas since 1971. It is rather mind-boggling to recognize how the concepts presented at these conferences have transformed scientific understanding and human society. In January 2017, the participants of PQE were asked to consider the equally important prospects for the future, and to formulate a set of questions representing some of the greatest aspirations in this broad field. The result is this multi-authored paper, in which many of the world’s leading experts address the following fundamental questions: (1) What is the future of gravitational wave astronomy? (2) Are there new quantum phases of matter away from equilibrium that can be found and exploited – such as the time crystal? (3) Quantum theory in uncharted territory: What can we learn? (4) What are the ultimate limits for laser photon energies? (5) What are the ultimate limits to temporal, spatial and optical resolution? (6) What novel roles will atoms play in technology? (7) What applications lie ahead for nitrogen-vacancy centres in diamond? (8) What is the future of quantum coherence, squeezing and entanglement for enhanced super-resolution and sensing? (9) How can we solve (some of) humanity’s biggest problems through new quantum technologies? (10) What new understanding of materials and biological molecules will result from their dynamical characterization with free-electron lasers? (11) What new technologies and fundamental discoveries might quantum optics achieve by the end of this century? (12) What novel topological structures can be created and employed in quantum optics?     

Creating an inclusive and participatory way-finding canvas for All

The recent development of the Chinese visual culture has shown the coexistence and the combination of two major trends: a seamless development involving changes and innovation, and a clear break between a before, often not so distinctly defined, and a now. Here, we can find that the idea of a contemporary national identity, that can be detected in crafts, art, graphics, design, architecture, fashion, music, dance and so on, is going through a process of constant development and maturation. This article summarises and discusses the process and some of the outcomes of a three years research project with a Design for All approach (DfA), started at Tongji University, and which aimed at co-creating a way-finding system through an open platform towards a strategic inclusive approach in the college. Our goal has been to offer a structured canvas to the school for the professors, the students and the staff so they could freely experience it, interpret it and work on it while adding new layers relative to the all the various present and future projects: a participatory, transcultural, multisensorial, inclusive and autopoietic project, i.e. DfA in its core.     

Interdisciplinary information input and output of a nano-technology project

The input and output information of a national project of Japan for nano-technology will be analysed. In 1996 Japanese government stipulated a guideline to evaluate national technology projects on economic criteria as well as technological ones. In addition to the criteria intrinsic to economy but extrinsic to technology and unfriendly to technologists, however, another view more intrinsic to technology may be useful as well. This study will attempt to complement the governmentally stipulated evaluation method with a bibliometric one. Considering the interdisciplinary approach as a merit of national projects, this study will analyse how interdisciplinary information was used as input and was published as output by the project. Focussing on the publication behaviours of the project, information flow from technology to science or a development pattern of science pulled by technology will be discussed. Finally, the matching of the evaluation criteria to technology development and the friendliness of evaluation methods to technologists will be discussed. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Reconciling engineer-to-order uncertainty by supporting front-end decision-making

This paper presents the dynamics of engineer-to-order (ETO) practice through Integration Definition for Function Modelling (IDEF) practice. The paper describes and defines how an ETO manufacturer utilised IDEF-QA in order to manage project uncertainties within the tendering process. The research is conceptualised through an empirical action research approach, involving an active role in the assessment of the ETO process. The paper revisits the use of IDEF, showcasing an assessment of output quality. It also suggests a road map for resource uncertainty within ETO, specifically when scoping the supply chain for ETO projects. The paper then presents an IDEF Quality Assessment model for improving the tendering process of ETO, and it examines the importance of evaluating project behaviour for supporting new future projects. The principal contribution is in how a structured approach provides IDEF with a quality assessment of resources, thereby consolidating and establishing a relationship for highlighting the uncertainties experienced by ETO manufacturers within the decision-making process.