I used to do a lot of programming. As a young teenager I was the lucky owner of a Commodore C64 doing my best to program moving starfields and Uridium clones in assembler. Much later, during one stage of my career I was heavily involved in train traffic simulator development. This meant getting fairly proficient […]
What are the general characteristics that set the steel industry apart from conventional manufacturing industry? And, depending on the answer, how do the processes of product development and production engineering differ from other manufacturing industries? One difference is that steel producers are faced with a divergent production flow where a few constituent materials are combined […]
From time to time I’ve read about companies that provide their employees with some fraction of their paid working time to do what they want. That is, to work on and elaborate any of their own ideas that they like as long as they fall reasonably within the company’s field of business. The most famous […]
The World Economic Forum (WEF) has just released its 2010 Lisbon Review. According to this report, Sweden is the most competitive nation in the EU [SvD]. According to the WEF press release, Sweden is “the most competitive economy as measured by the European Union’s (EU) own competition benchmark, the Lisbon criteria”. As I understand it, […]
Why is it that so few steel plants practice hot charging, i.e. why is the material allowed to cool down after casting only to be reheated again in the next processing step? Continuous casting is today the most frequently used method for production of steel workpieces. The continuous casting process was developed with high efficiency in […]
For the moment I’m concerned with industrial innovation processes. Why are they necessary? What types of innovation processes exist in an industrial production company? What’s the link between innovation and competitiveness? And how is innovation linked to related fields like organisational learning and dynamic capabilities? A couple of days ago I received a copy of […]
The idea of lean product development (LPD) came naturally when lean production evolved into the more general concept of “lean thinking”. Product development is different from manufacturing because, as soon as you target non–trivial development tasks, they will contain a degree of risk that introduces variation. You can’t remove this variation, because economic rewards in […]
Yesterday I was made aware of this article on the website of the Royal Institute of technology, KTH, where Margareta Norell Bergendahl, professor in integrated product development at KTH, discusses the danger of uncritically adopting lean principles in product development. It so happens that a couple of days ago I started reading Donald G. Reinertsen’s […]
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