Search results

The assembly‐initiated production (AIP) project aims at developing a strategy for mass‐customisation with short lead times through the production. The presented results are the outcome of cooperative work between KTH and 19 companies of different sizes, active in Sweden. AIP is formed around the idea to assemble products from product modules on customer orders. The total delivery time would be time to process order + assembly time + shipping‐time. This gives a total delivery time considerably shorter than when manufacturing the entire product to order. There are many factors to consider. Challenges like modularising the products to fit the strategy, finding ways to automate assembly and manufacturing operations, and at the same time, accomplish a flexible production solution. There are also many other factors to consider being successful in mass customisation, like materials supply and material handling issues, information system design and creating a suitable organisation form. Of utmost importance is the way the factors affect each other and the production as a whole when changes are made.

The purpose of this paper is to understand the change of the founder’s psychological ownership when s/he sells the business and its implications for the organization’s strategy.

The study contributes with a longitudinal study of psychological ownership, accounting for its development over time in a Swedish e-commerce company. By applying a case study methodology, conclusions are drawn from a vast amount of archival data and interviews. The empirical material covers the transition from a founder-run, family-owned to a first foreign-owned, and currently private-equity owned company.

Theoretically, it extends understandings of psychological ownership and its strategic implications by including former legal owners; that is, how psychological ownership changes after legal ownership ceases. Thereby, it develops the individual dimension (founder and former owner) of psychological ownership as well as its collective dimension (employees toward founder). The paper contributes to the psychological ownership founder and exit-literatures by highlighting continuity after the formal sale of legal ownership and its consequences for the organization.

It finds that new legal owners can use this heritage to signal continuity and launch strategic changes by transforming it into artifacts.

This study extends the understanding of development of psychological ownership of founders from foundation to exit and its consequences for the organization’s strategy. This extension sheds new light on founders as artifacts of organizations and thereby their role for the organizational heritage.

The method applied to carry out the study of the transformation of strategic alliances in emerging markets is discussed in this chapter. Specifically, this chapter discusses how the whole study is conducted, i.e. the identification and development of the research issues, the research aim and problem, the development of the conceptual framework, the development of the research method, how the empirical study is analyzed and conclusions are drawn. The specific research strategy applied to conduct the current study is a longitudinal research approach. A short discussion on how the ECE countries are classified into various groups is conducted in the current chapter and a detailed discussion on the classification of ECE countries into different groups is also conducted in chapter eight. Moreover, the logic for adopting a longitudinal research strategy to conduct the current study of the transformation of strategic alliances is also justified. The identification and choice of the case companies, the logic followed in the development of the questionnaire and how much and to what extent the questionnaire is modified are also discussed in detail. The identification of the interviewees, the execution of the interviews and the transcription of the interview materials and the structuring of the cases are also discussed in detail.

The British Robot Association annually awards a Travel scholarship. The 1986 winner from Imperial College reports on the first stage of his tour, to Sweden

A seminar organised by the Rapid Prototype and Manufacturing Association (RPMA) held at the UK Castings Development Centre in Birmingham presented a series of case studies on the application of rapid prototyping methods in the manufacture casting tools. Methods described included stereolithography, laser sintering and sand cast moulding. Amongst the case studies were descriptions of the production of a novel A‐post for the Volvo Safety Concept car, the production and ranking for accuracy and repeatability of aerospace components and the direct production of sand moulds for cylinder heads and a hydraulic valve.

This study aims to enable robotic friction stir welding (FSW) in practice. The use of robots has hitherto been limited, because of the large contact forces necessary for FSW. These forces are detrimental for the position accuracy of the robot. In this context, it is not sufficient to rely on the robot’s internal sensors for positioning. This paper describes and evaluates a new method for overcoming this issue.

A closed-loop robot control system for seam-tracking control and force control, running and recording data in real-time operation, was developed. The complete system was experimentally verified. External position measurements were obtained from a laser seam tracker and deviations from the seam were compensated for, using feedback of the measurements to a position controller.

The proposed system was shown to be working well in overcoming position error. The system is flexible and reconfigurable for batch and short production runs. The welds were free of defects and had beneficial mechanical properties.

In the experiments, the laser seam tracker was used both for control feedback and for performance evaluation. For evaluation, it would be better to use yet another external sensor for position measurements, providing ground truth.

These results imply that robotic FSW is practically realizable, with the accuracy requirements fulfilled.

The method proposed in this research yields very accurate seam tracking as compared to previous research. This accuracy, in turn, is crucial for the quality of the resulting material.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the influence of work-related value conflicts on information security in two organisations in nuclear power production and related industry.

A mixed-methods design was applied. Individual interviews were conducted with 24 employees of two organisations in Sweden and questionnaire data on information security climate were collected from 667 employees (62%) in the same two organisations.

The qualitative part of the study identified five different types of value conflicts influencing information security behaviour. The quantitative part of the study found that value conflicts relating to information security had a negative relationship with rule-compliant behaviour. The opposite was found for participative security behaviour where there was a positive relationship with value conflicts. A high climate of information security was positively related to both rule-compliant and participative information security behaviour. It also moderated the effect of value conflicts on compliant information security behaviour.

This paper highlights organisational contextual conditions that influence employees’ motivation and ability to manage value conflicts relating to information security in a high-risk industry. It also enables a better understanding of the influence of the information security climate on information security in the presence of value conflicts in this type of industry.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relations among job resources, value conflicts, information security climate and information security behaviour in the nuclear industry.

Longitudinal questionnaire data on information security climate and psychosocial working conditions were collected from two organisations in Sweden (response rate 62% and 59%, respectively).

A high occurrence of value conflicts decreased the participative information security behaviour, while psychosocial job resources and high job demands had positive effects on such behaviour. High rule-compliant information security behaviour led to fewer perceived value conflicts. When job resources were high, high job demands had a positive effect on rule compliance. Information security climate had a strong and positive cross-sectional relationship with information security behaviour but no longitudinal influence on behaviour. This suggests that the time interval, one year between measurements, may have been too long and events between measurements may have masked the causal process.

As one of very few longitudinal studies of information security, this study illuminated causal relationships regarding information security behaviour that have not been possible to identify in previous cross-sectional research. This enables better understanding of psychosocial phenomena and processes of importance for information security. This study does not provide conclusive results but indicates new important directions for research.

The purpose of this paper is to understand how a continuous improvement (CI) approach like lean production (LP) integration is affected by dynamic conditions and to propose how LP integration can be adaptable to dynamic conditions.

A longitudinal case study has been conducted in which data were collected through participative observations, observations, documents and an in-depth semi-structured interview.

The adaptability is related to the maturity level of the LP integration, where more mature organisations are better equipped to deal with the challenges occurring due to their learning and experimentation capabilities. The main problem is that the LP integration needs to be adapted, like compromising with just-in-time. This creates challenges to more immature organisations; they do not seem to be able to adapt the LP integration since the skills are lacking.

The research limitations are associated with the research design and therefore might limit generalisation of the context studied.

The management needs to stay focused on the LP integration to continue building CI capability. There is a need to adapt the LP concept, which includes assessing how proposed changes and the LP concept interact in order to make them reinforce each other. This involves creating guidelines concerning adaptation and facilitating a transition from mainly single-loop learning to double-loop learning.

This paper contributes by describing challenges that have an impact on LP integration and related organisational adaptability under dynamic conditions.