Situation awareness in a

digital product process

Findings from projects and company
co-operation

Jussi Horelli

www.hamk.fi
How to develop methods for companies (especially in
subcontracting networks) to improve situation awareness
aiming to more accurate decision making in product processes
(a military term from the battlefield somehow comparable to
product life cycle)

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 Situation(al) awareness?
• An individual actor’s realtime
understanding of
– What happens around
– What does it mean
– What will happen in the future

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 Product process
• Covers a wide entirety
• Procuct data is produced, modified and utilized by a
heterogenious group of professionals with varying
product data needs in company’s own and in
subcontractor’s and customer’s organizations
• Product data is created and edited in several
information systems – marketing, sales, product
development, production, service, training…
• Also training and research are spread in different
areas of product process
=> There are only a few people in a company who can
manage the whole product process
=> A single employee can practically not handle or
have expertiese in the whole product process – one
needs to co-operate and be able to work as a part
of a network

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 Digital product process

customers
production
subcontructors

Innovation
processes

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 The PLM grid

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 How to accomplish a situation when all crucial
information is delivered to those (and only to those) who
really need it (at least taking steps to that direction,
finding best practices)
– Customer feedback delivered to designers
– Design for manufacturability or maintenance (subcontracting?)
– Latest product data (and same versions) to all actors in the whole
supply chain
– Interaction in interfaces between different actors in the supply chain /
product process (questions and/or adjustments)
• social media –based things?

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 Searching for the right questions…

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Information should be available to those who need it

– All relevant information and in understandable

form
• What is relevant?
• Can all relevant information even be
collected/monitored?
– Only to those who need it
• Does the designer need feedback from the customers
• Subcontracting networks…
– Only relevant information
• Avoiding information flood
– The need for up-to-date/realtime information

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 Three approaches for better situation awareness
(in one of our projects…)
• Formal product processes
– efficiency of product processes,
– bottlenecks,
– misunderstandings,
– lack of information / information flood
• How to utilize informal / non structured information
– informal customer feedback / buzz
– the challenge of managing the growing amount of informal or undocumented
information
• the use of social media –based solutions (mashup based portal)
• Optimal utilization of virtual models
– cost effective product processes
– virtual models in designing (concurrent engineering), training, maintenance,
testing (test design), marketing etc
– simulation based maintenance or service?

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Recent findings about the needs to impove
product data management in SMEs
• Spreading the information of new solutions (new products, design,
assembly or service solutions) inside the companies (from product
design to customer interface, aftersales and service business)
does not work as it should
– After sales and service staff typically does not access the latest product data
which causes delays and poor efficiency in delivery, assembly and service
– Product data is cronically behind the real product

• Product design and product management lack tools and ability to

utilize and integrate to their own processes the information from
the customer interface concerning the usability, design solutions
and customer needs
– Unefficient tools and methods for exploiting customer based information (a
huge potential for knowledge engineering / crowdsourcing –based approach)
– Design errors escalate to further deliveries, because feedback information
does not reach the designers or it can not be analyzed

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Recent findings about the needs to impove
product data management in SMEs
• Typical reasons for poor management of product
information
– Insufficient determination/adaption of processes

– Poor integration possibilities and usability of it-tools and applications from work
task’s point (for designers, product support…)

• Why?
– Tools for collecting customer data (user experiences and opinions) already exist
and are in use
– The bottleneck is in tools and methods for utilizing, refining and integrating
collected knowledge to work processes in sensible way

• SOA, Web 2.0 and social media applications offer

potential methods for processing, analyzing, filtering and
routing information
– Feeds, mashup, wiki, professional online communities, social navigation…

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 Situation awareness in a digital
product process
• The capability for decision making should also in
industry be based on solid situation awareness
• In ideal cases the situation awareness is based on
realtime digital data from the process itself and in
networked product processes also from subcontractor’s
processes as well
– The formal information from the processes
– Unformal information
• Partly from external sources (customers, markets,…)
• From the beginning of product’s lifecycle (innovation
processes)
• Practically – especially in SMEs – product process in not
established and does not offer optimal support for full
situation awareness

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 Challenges and possibilities in
improving situation awareness
• Above all: the way of doing things, not
necessary even new information tools
• Critical situational information is often delivered
in phone, email, corridor conversations

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 Daily challenges
• Inadequate or even false fundamental information for
one’s work task
• Especially experience knowledge is scattered in different
information systems and/or its’ findability is insecure or
requires a lot of work
• Collection, handling, informing and following of changes,
development ideas, production anomalies is challenging
• Findings from customers and customer interface
reaches product design and planning slowly

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 Simulation

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 The possibilities of simulation in digital
product process

Apros
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 The use of simulation

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 Social media?

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Information analogies

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 Making information available

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 Shared product data

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 An efficient way to utilize design
data for various needs

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 Mashups

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 BI with mashup

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 Search Learns From BI, And BI Learns From Search

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 Portal vs. mashup
Portal Mashup
Older technology, extension to traditional Web Using newer, loosely defined "Web 2.0"
Classification
server model using well defined approach techniques
Approaches aggregation by splitting role of
Uses APIs provided by different content sites
Web server into two phases: markup
Philosophy/Approach to aggregate and reuse the content in
generation and aggregation of markup
another way
fragments
Can operate on pure XML content and also
Aggregates presentation-oriented markup
Content dependencies on presentation-oriented content (e.g.,
fragments (HTML, WML, VoiceXML, etc.)
HTML)
Traditionally content aggregation takes place Content aggregation can take place either
Location dependencies
on the server on the server or on the client
"Melting Pot" style - Individual content may
"Salad bar" style: Aggregated content is
Aggregation style be combined in any manner, resulting in
presented 'side-by-side' without overlaps
arbitrarily structured hybrid content
CRUD operations are based on REST
Read and update event models are defined
Event model architectural principles, but no formal API
through a specific portlet API
exists
Portlet behavior is governed by standards Base standards are XML interchanged as
JSR 168, JSR 286 and WSRP, although portal REST or Web Services. RSS and Atom are
Relevant standards
page layout and portal functionality are commonly used. More specific mashup
undefined and vendor-specific standards such as EMML are emerging.

wikipedia

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 Demos
• http://www.officelabs.com/Pages/Envisioning.aspx
• Apatar
• Open atrium

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