engleski

Capturing, storing, and using data acquired by smart products to support product development

Effective utilisation of data, information, and knowledge plays a critical role in achieving and sustaining a competitive advantage for engineering and manufacturing companies. Industry trends and advanced technologies such as smart connected products, internet of things, digital thread, digital twin, and digital feedback loop enable a digital footprint of a product continuously monitoring its conditions, usage, and working environment through embedded sensors. If integrated with data acquired from other sources (such as enterprise business systems), continuously analysed, and presented in an easily comprehensible way, a newly available product data might provide additional insights and lower uncertainties in understanding of how a product is used on the market. These use potentials are rapidly changing product development as an interlinked sequence of information processing activities with the continuous generation, conversion, and transformation of product data collected from numerous sources at various stages of the product lifecycle. However, an empirically grounded methodology for employing usage data to enhance the execution of product development activities that may be implemented in specific engineering company is still missing in the literature. The presented thesis discusses infrastructural and organisational requirements for utilisation of usage data in product development. It is argued that a data exploitation and analysis application providing such work needs to be built on an understanding of engineers' information behaviours and tailored to specific activities they perform. This is illustrated empirically using insights gathered through a qualitative case study conducted in an engineering and manufacturing company – a global provider of products, systems and services to the construction industry. Presented work contributes to the research on design methodology, providing transparency on the product development activities with the highest potential benefits of exploiting new data capabilities. Besides, the presented overview of infrastructural and organizational elements can be beneficial for engineering and manufacturing companies seeking to integrate data acquired by smart, connected products within productive enterprise business systems and effectively employ it in product development.

Smart connected products ; Digital twin ; Digital thread ; Product development ; Information behaviour

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