Product Creation Process Research Articles

Decision Support for Energy Efficient Production in Product and Production Development

Realizing extensive energy savings in the manufacturing of products calls for a comprehensive strategy, exploiting cross-departmental influences. Approaches that consider aspects of product and production development independently do not go far enough and are often already exhausted. In previous research, the authors introduced a correlation matrix that assesses the influence between different phases of the product creation process (i.e. product development and production development). This matrix is taken as a basis for a decision support in order to choose suitable methods according to the early phases of the product creation process. The methods that have been developed address the influences between different phases on the product and production side, assessing the energy consumption in manufacturing. As a result, the most energy efficient product solutions - related to the manufacturing - as well as production system solutions are determined. On the basis of these decisions, products and production systems that consume lower energy in production can be detailed.

Co-Creating Games with Children

In this paper, the authors investigate the role of and relationship between creative production practices (e.g. problem-solving and self-evaluation) and cooperative learning mechanisms (e.g. building trust and group processing) in a case of game co-design. 21 Belgian school children created game concepts together with a game designer, their teacher, and co-design facilitators. During a project week at school, participants moved from idea generation to presenting game concepts through collaboratively created prototypes. This case study, combining observation and survey methods, reveals that self-evaluation and openness to sharing ideas emerged spontaneously, but the critical analysis of digital games and crediting existing work require support. Moreover, as creative choices become part of group deliberation, progress in the creative production process critically depends on group functioning. The authors conclude that by grounding co-design in theory on cooperative learning and media literacy, co-design activities may be better understood and new avenues for supporting co-creators can be identified.

Total design control within the sustainable engineering design process

New engineering products require designing before manufacture, the driving fundamental for which is normally that of cost. The product must be able to be produced as cheaply as possible to increase the profit margin. It is increasingly important to consider environmental issues so that new products incorporate a 'low environmental impact'. The novel approach presented introduces the design function as the only function within the whole product creation process that can define, direct and apply the principles of sustainability. This paper reviews sustainability principles and enhances the design and manufacture model to encompass the whole life of the product from sourcing to disposal. The life cycle approach is well known but the novel sustainability approach presented considers six 'life phases' applying the principles of engineering design to each phase. The management concept has been developed of 'total design control' where it is the design function which controls and specifies all six life phases.

Understanding the Interaction of Design Students with Portable Computers in the Classroom

Laptop computers are an indispensable tool for the learning of Product Design. However the universities classrooms are not adapted to the new technological evolutions and working processes. The main objectives of this study were to analyze the human-computer interaction in Product Design classrooms, by observing the users, the work activity and the environment, to understand the current demands for the use of laptop computers, and to observe current patterns of student interaction, and their needs. Data were gathered and analyzed from a set of classrooms in a Portuguese university using the following methodologies: free observation; systematic indirect observation through video recording and analysis; and student survey. The results show that 56.5% of the study participants use information systems in the classroom, of these, 90% use laptop computers, and use this devices individually. In general, about 52% of the records indicate that in the classroom the information systems were used by less than 50% of the class students. This study results can promote: (a) the development of a set of data and information that can assist designers and other professionals in the product creation process; (b) the awareness of the universities to the need to modernize the spaces, furniture, and equipment, and to adapt them to the new processes of work and to the new student-computer interactional behaviors.

Improving the Effectiveness of Virtual Teams: Tackling Knowledge Management and Knowledge Sharing A real case scenario

Globalisation has led to the development of new kinds of knowledge work and collaboration schemes. In globalised companies, virtual teams are a phenomenon of critical interest, and to understand the way they manage knowledge flows is becoming more relevant in terms of increased effectiveness, discoverability and reuse. The growing amount of available knowledge poses a challenge of many dimensions to innovative companies. This includes the evaluation their intangible assets that are an essential factor in many corporate initiatives. This research reports on the analysis of a real case scenario in the context of dynamic knowledge retrieval by using the Open plexus framework, a distributed knowledge sharing system that supports knowledge discovery and contextaware knowledge sharing in virtual teams by introducing a 3-tier knowledge sharing architecture. Each tier holds the knowledge of one of the following dimensions: individuals (the personal knowledge created by one knowledge worker), teams (she shared vocabulary and experience-based knowledge that is a result of team processes) and the organisation (the persistent knowledge of the organisational memory that is globally available). Based on a recent management tool, the Knowledge Path Method Model, the system starts recognising and eliminating stale knowledge in the project; thereby reducing the cognitive load of all the agents involved in the development of a new product. These findings allow eliminating the unnecessary interchange of knowledge flowing in the net of knowledge workers, optimising the time to market and increasing the quality and effectiveness of tasks. In addition, it is used to articulate team internal processes which help identifying the agents that are dispensable as members of a specific knowledge flow path. It helps adjusting the use of assigned resources and, simultaneously, identifying the virtual knowledge linked to the product's creation processes. Drawing broadly from our case study, the analysis reveals that Openplexus is able to help identify and monitor important knowledge paths and emergent knowledge flow patterns with their related contexts and thus improves the effectiveness of the employed knowledge worker. The findings have high implications for managers and Human Resources departments, as they can start measuring the traces relevant knowledge leaves in virtual teams.

A Method for Forecasting the Running Costs of Manufacturing Technologies in Automotive Production during the Early Planning Phase

The running costs of production sites are a decisive factor in the overheads of automotive production. Because of this, it is important for many operators to decrease those costs in a sustainable way. Therefore, they try to reduce both the energy consumption costs of production systems, as well as their maintenance costs. However, most parts of the running costs are already determined during the very early phases of the product creation process. The approach in this paper shows how the decision for a specific manufacturing technology influences the factory costs. It is necessary to determine the life-cycle costs with regard to the manufacturing technology. Therefore, deep knowledge about the process itself and the support processes is required. This paper shows how cost relevant parameters can be identified and introduces a method to determine the prospective costs for maintenance and energy consumption in advance.

Managing and optimising the creative production process

Managing and optimising the creative production process has gained increasing prominence in the past few years, as organisations look for efficiency gains by taking a more operationally focused approach to producing creative work. In most cases, the creative production process lacks one crucial element that exists in most other aspects of the organisation: metrics and measurement. Creative operations business intelligence is the application of data, analysis and measurement against important metrics to the creative production process and it is what strategic creative operations teams are using to achieve their goals of increasing the number of assets produced on time, maximising their production capacity and reducing the cost of asset production. This paper covers the underlying need for measuring creative production, the challenges inherent in gathering data from the production process, the benefits to be gained from said measurement and techniques to integrate data into the decision-making process.

Business Models and Tactics in New Product Creation: The Interplay of Effectuation and Causation Processes

Effectuation and causation are two contrasting approaches to new business development. We argue that these two approaches are generic decision-making mechanisms that can coexist with one another and that they are configured in specific ways during different phases in the process of new product creation. These decision-making mechanisms are influenced by internal and external market factors: the nature of activities of a phase and the interplay between the business model and tactics. Our research framework is a generic two-stage competitive process that separates business models from tactics. We conducted an in-depth case study of a console game creation project to examine these decision-making mechanisms and to explore how business models are formulated and how each mechanism influences subsequent tactics during the new product creation process. Our findings suggest the following four decision-making configurations with unique modes of interplay between business models and tactics: effectuation centric, discovery centric, causation centric, and tactic centric. The theoretical insights on the linkage between decision-making mechanisms and business models have important practical implications for new product creation.

Fashion as a Marketing Tool and Its Communication Aspect in Developing Markets

In this article the idenfication of a fashion product, its variability and the analyses of fashion as an industrial design will be discussed within the framework of fashion product marketing. The process of product creation is closely related to the economic, sociological and psychological factors considered, hence, sociologists and trend setters are working together because the concept of fashion product should be viewed as a determiner of status and power of a certain community. Each group within the community should be defined within a certain status and therefore each status corresponds to a relevant fashion concept. The survival of the fashion designers within the industrial sector could only be plausable if fashion is firstly analyzed conceptually and then applied separately to each group of the community.

Involvement of Procurement in the Product Creation Process: A Systematization Scheme of Measures

Manufacturing firms transferred a significant share of their value creation in terms of the development and manufacturing to suppliers, while concentrating on their core competences. The subsequent integration of suppliers challenges the procurement department as connector between internal organizational customers and external suppliers in the supply chain network. Over the last decades, industry and academia provided numerous measures that address specific situations in this involvement process. However, there is a lack in literature on their systematization. This paper aspires a systematization scheme of measures for involving procurement in product creation processes describing the measures against a set of classifying criteria.

Enabling Product Development Engineers to Select and Combine Methods for Sustainable Design

A broad range of engineering methods, from simple checklists to sophisticated analytical tools, has been introduced to support the development of more sustainable products. Nevertheless, a lack of holistic approaches, which support the entire product creation process, can be observed. Combining the advantages of different existing methods could enable a rather continuous decision support. This paper presents an analysis and a categorization of current tools. On this foundation a process-based approach for method selection and combination is derived. By determining the concrete output of a method it becomes possible to use this information for defining sustainability milestones in project management. Hence, the allocation of design methods to different phases of the product creation process can be performed more intuitively and a combination of methods is encouraged. In order to test this approach, an exemplary redesign of a turbocharger has been conducted. From a pool of 50 methods nine are systematically selected and applied in order to check whether the selection was successful or not.

Comedy, Creativity, and Culture: A Metamodern Perspective

The construction of humour is a creative activity, but humour theories tend to focus on the structural elements of a text, the social purpose and reception of humour, the cognitive impacts and affective effects of humour, or the clash of incongruous ideas that exist before the producer and the audience. However, the production of humour, in particular the production process of comedy, has received little theoretical attention. Neither creativity nor humour exists in a context-free cultural vacuum; any general theory of culture should have something to say about both. For example, the Western conception of creativity is concerned with novelty and originality while that of Eastern societies is more concerned with the perfection of a tradition. Comedy draws from both tradition and novelty. This paper will argue that a disjunction exists between creativity theory and humour theory as illuminated by the relationship of theory and practice in comedy production. Theories of creativity, such as Csikszentmihalyi's systems model which attempts to illuminate the creative production process, can be useful in bridging the gap between the theory and practice of humour creation. This metamodern perspective on comedy will collapse the binary oppositions of novelty and tradition, and theory and practice.

PEMETAAN PEMASARAN KERELASIAN PELANGGAN, KOLABORASI PEMASOK, SUMBER DAYA PERUSAHAAN, KEUNGGULAN BERSAING DAN KINERJA PEMASARAN

To find out the cause of poor performance of SMEs metal automotive components in Java, author mapping “Customer Relationship Marketing, Suppliers Collaboration, Firm Resources, Competitive Advantage, Performance Marketing (a survey of SMEs metal automotive components in Java). "This study used 221 respondents SMEs metal automotive components in Java with cluster random sampling method and usingdescriptive analysis for qualitative variables. SMEs metal automotive components in the Java able to build relationship marketing with customers. The best form of customer Relationship marketing is the interaction of technical draw information, while the less good is the product creation process of technical assistance. SMEs metal automotive components are able to build collaboration with suppliers. The best form of suppliers collaboration is information of specification and amount of raw materials, while the less one is the raw material of knowledge transfer. Firm resources owned by SMEs metal automotive components in Java is strong enough. The resources of the most powerful companies are experienced human use of existing machinery and equipment, while theweakest are the royalty payments from its findings. SMEs metal utomotive components capable of creating competitive advantage. The best element of competitive advantage is able to achieve rapid delivery times, while that have not been able to achieve is to reduce the price of the product through increased labor productivity. SMEs metal automotive components, although able to improve marketing performance, but sales growth is still low and relatively small profit margins, and customer growth is still low.

145 ものづくりのための企業内教育 : 設計技術者教育の実例(OS 設計教育・CAD教育(II))

145 ものづくりのための企業内教育 : 設計技術者教育の実例(OS 設計教育・CAD教育(II))

Guest Editorial Managing for Reliability

It is argued that what we need today is not more detailed emphasis on the technical tools, methods, and techniques of reliability engineering, but rather a clear call to management to establish design rules that favor the development of reliable products. Management must begin its product creation process with the end in mind. Yes, profitability is one measure of that end, but so is reliability. If a product is not engineered for reliability, it will not be inherently reliable, but it will be subject to the whims of chance, and the laws of entropy. Thus, it is a true obligation of management to create the circumstances by which the methods of reliability engineering can be applied to make capable products that meet the tests of market conditions. More emphasis on delivering strength through reliability must become an initiative for good governance at the level of the Boards of Directors. A Board is responsible for strategic oversight of the organization, which must include assurance of a robust reliability program for delivering long-term strength.

131 モノ創りと図面の文化(設計教育・CAD教育(I))

131 モノ創りと図面の文化(設計教育・CAD教育(I))

Subject Positions and Power Relations in Creative Organizations: Taking a Discursive View on Organizational Creativity

In this paper we take a discursive view on organizational creativity and examine subject positions and power relations produced within a discourse on creativity in two different kinds of creative organizations, an opera house and a games company. In particular, we focus on the ways in which the discourse is practised in creative production processes. The two cases illustrate how the macro-level discourse on creativity can be enacted in a more micro-level construction of subjectivities. In the study we identified several subject positions that were shared by both organizations, and examined how they were embedded in the organizations' formal and informal hierarchies. By taking a discursive approach to creativity, we have also been able to explore some unwanted consequences of emphasizing creativity in organizations.

Intellectual property rights on creativity and heritage: the case of the fashion industry

Recently, as different projects aiming to define and reinforce property rights in the fashion industry have been elaborated and discussed, a lot of papers have been dedicated to the question of property rights in this industry. Our paper considers the problems from a specific point of view; it focuses on the relation between property rights and creativity. If property rights allow the allocation of the majority of standard industrial goods without any special difficulty, however, when they are applied to creative goods, new problems arise. Then, for us, the persistence of a low system of IPRs in the fashion industry does not mainly derive from its efficiency but from the characteristics of the inputs that are used in the creative production process. They constitute strong constraints for defining, entitling, legitimating, enforcing, valuating and exchanging property rights. Thus, the different economic actors develop different kinds of strategic behaviour in order to obtain earnings and can try to protect copyrights, trademarks, new assets, old assets (heritage), private or collective assets, and so on. The institutional characteristics of this specific industry—such as the models of management, the type of ownership, the size of the firms, … lead to different historical models of management through IPRs. Peculiarly, the financial groups that integrate fashion into the new luxury industries currently try to implement new IPRs and to move towards a stronger system of IPRs but the management model of the street fashion puts an obstacle to this project.

Enhancing Rural Manufacturers Competitiveness Through Design Automation For New Product Development

The competitiveness of third world manufacturing has placed pressure on U.S. manufacturers to create new products to survive. Computer aided solid modeling and rapid prototyping technologies accelerate new product development, but rural manufacturers are often left behind. This paper describes a cooperative venture between a state university and a federal agency to improve the new product development process of selected rural manufacturers by introducing them to leading-edge design automation technologies. Use of these tools allows better cross-functional communication among top management, marketing, designers, engineers, and manufacturing as they proceed through the new product creation process. Participating companies produced new product options, enhanced employment, and increased revenues.

313 実践的設計課題に基づく三次元CAD教育とモノづくり(設計教育・CAD教育(I))

313 実践的設計課題に基づく三次元CAD教育とモノづくり(設計教育・CAD教育(I))