Anita Friis Sommer

Improved Product Development Performance through Agile/Stage-Gate Hybrids: The Next-Generation Stage-Gate Process?

OVERVIEW: Product development at manufacturing companies is increasingly complex. Linear product development processes, including the traditional Stage-Gate process, cannot support the iterative cycles and external collaboration that characterize todays product development efforts. Hybrid processes combining elements of Agile and Stage-Gate models offer a more flexible alternative to conventional systems. A comparative case study of seven technology-intensive companies shows how combining Stage-Gate models, at the strategic level, with the Agile method Scrum, implemented at the execution level, can offer performance improvements and other advantages over even improved Stage-Gate processes. The key contribution of this study is a generic Agile/Stage-Gate hybrid process based on best practices as identified in the case companies.

Scrum in the Traditional Development Organization: Adapting to the Legacy

During the last couple of years, the application of Scrum as a project management framework has been broadened from initially belonging to the software domain. Now companies within the field of traditional product development are starting to implement Scrum in an attempt to improve their development efforts with respect to resource efficiency and speed.

Framework for Information Sharing in a Small-to-Medium Port System Supply Chain

Small-to-medium ports are characterised with inefficient, ineffective and resource intensive information sharing, which is not supporting their complex and dynamic environment. This creates challenges both for optimizing the internal planning of the activities at the port according to the demand, and for stronger supply chain integration with the external actors. This paper focuses on identifying the needs and criteria for an information sharing system, and proposes an approach for sharing operational data in port systems for improved supply chain integration, in the context of logistic engineering. The proposed approach has the potential to alleviate some of the problems when operating in a dynamic demand environment.

Scrum integration in stage-gate models for collaborative product development: A case study of three industrial manufacturers

The relevance of collaborative Product Development (PD) is rising with the decrease of product life cycles combined with growing customer demands. Industrial manufacturers now experience competition in the global market where differentiation is necessary for survival. Hence, in order to differentiate from low-cost competitors and increase PD performance, some industrial manufacturers now seek competitive advantage by experimenting with new ways for collaborative PD. This includes integrating customer-focused agile process models like Scrum from the software industry into their existing PD models. Thus, instead of replacing traditional stage-gate models, agile methods are currently integrated in existing PD models generating hybrid solution for collaborative PD. This paper includes a study of three industrial cases that have successfully integrated Scrum into the stage-gate process model for collaborative PD. The paper introduces the three functional hybrid models, including the impact on PD performance, PD roles and customer collaboration.

Agile–Stage-Gate for Manufacturers: Changing the Way New Products Are DevelopedIntegrating Agile project management methods into a Stage-Gate system offers both opportunities and challenges.

OVERVIEW: Agile development methods borrowed from the software industry are now being used by a handful of manufacturing firms for the development of physical products. Agile methods, which include time-boxed sprints, daily stand-up meetings, and early demos and retrospectives, are typically embedded within some or all of the stages of an existing Stage-Gate system. This article presents six case studies from major firms experimenting with Agile–Stage-Gate hybrids. These results show that early outcomes of these efforts are quite positive; some firms report significant improvements in both time to market and development productivity, as well as faster responses to changing market conditions and customer needs and higher project team morale. However, they also identified many challenges in implementing Agile–Stage-Gate hybrids, including addressing management skepticism, finding the needed resources to field dedicated teams, and dealing with fluid product definitions and development plans. Based on case firms’ experiences, we provide recommendations for implementing a hybrid product development system.

Governing and Managing Customer-Initiated Engineering Change: An In-Depth Case Study of a Global Industrial Supplier

Engineering change management is managing an alteration made to the technical system and/or its related value chain processes and documentation that have already been released during the product and process design process. The change can either emerge during the process or be initiated internally or externally by for instance customers. Managing initiated engineering changes is a vital source for improving product performance and radically reducing change costs. Customer-initiated engineering change is an area growing in importance decreasing product life cycles and increasing demand for customisation. Through an in-depth case study, this paper investigates which process and what governance setup is appropriate to manage customer initiated engineering changes, referred to as request management. The paper includes a proposal for a request management framework and a task-based iterative process model based on existing engineering change management theory and case study findings.

Leveraging Virtual Experimentation and Simulation to Improve R&D Performance: A preliminary maturity matrix for virtual experimentation and simulation technologies can help companies understand where and how to develop simulation capabilities.

OVERVIEW: Virtual experimentation and simulation—the use of mathematical models and computer-based simulations to replicate the behavior and performance of physical systems and traditional experiments—has been steadily growing over the past two decades, driven by continual developments in technology and techniques. Virtual experimentation and simulation can enable companies to innovate more effectively and efficiently and build competitive advantage. However, the development and implementation of virtual capabilities is not simple and not without pitfalls; some companies have struggled to fully leverage these technologies. What is currently missing from the knowledge landscape is a common measure of where an organization stands with regard to its virtual capabilities and of what parameters drive effective use of virtual experimentation and simulation. To fill this gap, we offer a preliminary maturity matrix, a framework that can be used to judge an organization’s maturity and effectiveness in developing and deploying virtual experimentation and simulation capabilities.

Challenges in Request Management – Demand management of customer-driven product development

Request management (RQM) is a new term used for managing customer requests for new products. It is the counterpart to typical product development processes, which has no direct customer involvement. It is essential to manage customer requests in a structured and efficient way to obtain profitability. This research study seeks to investigate the challenges of RQM in practice. Existing demand chain management literature is used as a basis for developing a RQM framework. RQM is investigated through an explorative research design in a dyadic B2B case study including a global industrial company and its customers. The study provides an insight into a new area of supply chain management, including the process activity flow and challenges involved across the process. Furthermore, the method is dyadic including the customer in the case study, which is rare in related research.

Supplier Value of Customer-Initiated Product Development: An In-Depth Case Study of a European Industrial Mass-Producer

Increased market demand and shortened product life cycles generate industrial customer requests for collaborative product development. Manufacture-to-stock suppliers struggle to manage the request process to obtain profitability. The purpose of this paper is to investigate if request management is profitable for mass-producing suppliers, and to examine possible relations between profitability of requests and the requesting customer. Through a case study, request management is identified as a profitable process due to long-term accumulated profit from developed products. Request profitability is not identified as related to profitability or turnover of existing customers, and thus profitability of requests cannot be predicted based on these customer data. Results from a coupled interview study indicate that request management has a large potential for future exploitation, and an outline of the supplier value potential of collaborative product development is proposed.

Activity-based process model for customer-driven product development

Due to increased customer demands and shortened product life cycles, industrial mass-producers receive an increasing amount of customer requests. The requests have various degrees of complexity requiring engineering changes to existing products or development of new products depending on the nature of the request. Managing this process is termed customer-driven Product Development (PD). In order to increase process performance, an activity-based process model should be utilized. However, existing process models do not consider this special case of integration between collaborative PD and customer-initiated engineering change management. Thus, the purpose of this study is to explore customer-driven PD to develop new insights into an increasingly relevant PD process. The paper includes an embedded case study of a large industrial mass-producer and its customers. The paper contributes to existing research proposing a process model for customer-driven PD adding new knowledge to PD research.