Visualizing the factory through meta- manufacturing processes

Milestone or deadline driven production management is predominant in most manufacturing companies. Problems and other disturbing occurrences tend to see their first daylight during phases where plans are implemented into reality, for example, when production commences, prototypes enter manufacturing and deliveries are expected. Conventional control routines fail to depict the true progress and procedures of the company on an on-line basis, which means that instead of being proactive they serve as means to react to already existing problems. This paper studies the application of advanced visualization techniques to the already existing information embedded in a comany's information infrastructure, and how it can help management to anticipate probable near future pitfalls. By studying those daily operations of a company which share a document relationship with the true manufacturing process, that is, the meta-manufacturing processes, a completely new perspective on the company's value-adding activities is drawn. By mining the existing data reservoirs of a company traditionally difficult management processes, such as product development, vendor integration, production planning, can be analysed and the problems identified in a novel way to react in advance. The paper displays several empirical examples from bulk to one-of-a-kind production where the method has been successfully implemented.     

Bridging Practice and Theory: A Design Science Approach

Despite ambitious efforts in various fields of research over multiple decades, the goal of making academic research relevant to the practitioner remains elusive: theoretical and academic research interests do not seem to coincide with the interests of managerial practice. This challenge is more fundamental than knowledge transfer, it is one of diverging knowledge interests and means of knowledge production. In this article, we look at this fundamental challenge through the lens of design science, which is an approach aimed primarily at discovery and problem solving as opposed to accumulation of theoretical knowledge. We explore in particular the ways in which problem‐solving research and theory‐oriented academic research can complement one another. In operations management (OM) research, recognizing and building on this complementarity is especially crucial, because problem‐solving–oriented research produces the very artifacts (e.g., technologies) that empirical OM research subsequently evaluates in an attempt to build explanatory theory. It is indeed the practitioner—not the academic scientist—who engages in basic research in OM. This idiosyncrasy prompts the question: how can we enhance the cross‐fertilization between academic research and research practice to make novel theoretical insights and practical relevance complementary? This article proposes a design science approach to bridge practice to theory rather than theory to practice.     

A framework of motivations for industry-big science collaboration: A case study

The epistemic (knowledge creation) benefits of big science centres are obvious to everyone. During an era of tight budgetary constraints, however, it is difficult to justify the existence of these centres on the basis of their epistemic contributions alone. Although it is recognized that the contributions are not limited to epistemic types only, the picture of other types of contribution (e.g., spin-off benefits) remains blurred. The present paper proposes a framework for depicting and discussing the various contributions of big science centres in a systematic manner.The main objective of the paper is to provide policy-makers, industrialists, and academics with a framework to justify, motivate and establish systematic technological interaction between big science centres and industry. The framework comprises six basic dimensions. These dimensions are viewed both from the industrial and from the scientific perspective, and partly from the public perspective. It is argued that direct and measurable incentives constitute only a fraction of the overall benefits stemming from the industrial-scientific collaboration. The paper concludes with a framework of motivations and actions to materialize them.