Precision or “Personalized Medicine” and “Big Data” are growing trends in the biomedical research community and highlight an increased focus on access to larger datasets to effectively explore disease processes at the molecular level versus the previously common one-size-fits all approach. This focus necessitated a local transition from independent lab and siloed projects to a single software application utilizing a common ontology to create access to data from multiple repositories. Use of a common system has allowed for increased ease of collaboration and access to quality biospecimens that are extensively annotated with clinical, molecular, and patient associated data. The software needed to function at an enterprise level while continuing to allow investigators the autonomy and security access they desire. To identify a solution, a working group comprised of representation from independent repositories and areas of research focus across departments was established and responsible for review and implementation of an enterprise-wide biospecimen management system. Central to this process was the creation of a unified vocabulary across all repositories, including consensus around source of truth, standardized field definitions, and shared terminology.

From an economic perspective, the appeal of a product diminishes over time. However, volatile markets and divergent technological advancements make it challenging to anticipate when and to what extent changes will be necessary. Therefore, it is important to be able to integrate changes after a product's launch. This paper provides an overview of different perspectives on the product lifecycle. In addition, the paper presents an empirical study on implementing changes at an automobile manufacturer.

The Digital Thread is a system that connects different phases of the product lifecycle and the related data across one or more companies in the supply chain. This work aims to develop a graph data model of the Digital Thread, in the context of the vision of polyglot persistence, that interconnects the different phases of the lifecycle and their corresponding data models, processes, and IT systems. This work proposes a Digital Thread Graph that integrates a Digital Model and a derived Digital Twin, using object and relation attributes for view creation and filtering while minimizing redundancy.

Engineering changes are necessary to stay competitive, unavoidable and occur more frequently with increased product complexity. Currently, scheduling of engineering changes into production and supply chain is a manual process. With new possibilities in the field of artificial intelligence, this publication presents the vision of a flexible multi-agent system with four agents and a single shared database. By autonomously scheduling changes and predicting KPI impacts of implementation dates, the agent-system provides additional capacity and decision-making support to the organisation.

Engineering change management is a central part of the product development process. This paper investigates how variations from the PGE - Product Generation Engineering can improve the evaluation of engineering changes from the wiring harness. Engineering changes that occur in an automotive wiring harness development process are analysed in a case study, evaluated in expert interviews with regard to the risk and effort connected to the implementation and compared to the types of variations. Additional influencing factors are discussed. The variations provide an indication on risk and effort.

Requirements changes are a leading cause for project failures. Due to propagation effects, change management requires dependency analysis. Existing approaches have shortcomings regarding ability to process large requirement sets, availability of required data, differentiation of propagation behavior and consideration of higher order dependencies. This paper introduces a new method for advanced requirement dependency analysis based on machine learning. Evaluation proves applicability and high performance by means of a case example, 4 development projects and 3 workshops with industry experts.

Each year, automotive OEMs implement a variety of Engineering Changes (ECs) in their production. In the timing of ECs, different KPIs are often in conflict with one another or even unknown to the OEMs. Therefore, OEMs struggle to identify the optimal date to implement an EC. This paper presents a method to determine the cost-optimal implementation date for each EC, considering time, cost, and quality KPIs based on a new EC classification rule-set. To evaluate the presented method, case-studies at a German automotive OEM were performed, two of which are discussed.

Whilst remanufacture is identified as a key enabler for sustainable manufacture in future industry, its role within the context of new product development remains unclear. Where prototypes often go through multiple iterations with varying degrees of change, could remanufacture be adopted to reduce the time and cost components of design iteration? This paper presents a computational study to explore the potential savings afforded by remanufacture across stages of a rapid prototyping process. Results suggest significant reductions to development time and cost can be achieved.

Process modelling (PM) is used to support designers by providing guidance on what needs to be done. Change processes in development organizations accompany introduction of new procedures, new methods (also digital form), tools that have to integrated into existing processes. Objective of this paper is to provide guidance to designers in selecting the appropriate PM language to support structured changes in processes. Requirements are derived from frequent change needs in SME and a PM morphology is provided assisting the selection and use of suitable PM languages for change processes.

A lively debate progresses about change to the professions, including law, especially change in the form of managerialism. ‘Managerialism’ covers the methods and beliefs of managers within organisations, used to actively influence, evaluate, and ‘market’ professional work. But what about when that managerialism is change itself? How do we understand managerialism-as-change? This paper reports on an interview study with change managers, or ‘transformation leaders’ in the legal profession. Transformation leaders offer rich insights into the dynamics of professional change because they are incontrovertibly change agents. They are also themselves a form of managerial change as a new cadre of managers within the professions; managers with ‘hybrid’ identities whose legitimacy in professional settings is not assured. The findings presented include: the change leaders’ identities; the types of change being introduced; the constraints on and affordances for change in legal practices; and how change leaders secure, and sometimes struggle to secure, the authority needed to implement change. The concluding discussion highlights the study's contributions to our understanding of professional change and managerialism in the legal context – both what changes are being pursued and how they are materialising through certain ‘managerial’ goals, strategies, and the interactions of those with mixed identities and status.

In this article Michael Maher writes about the declining print needs for law libraries within UK law firms in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic. The article begins by looking at the initial financial impact Covid-19 had across UK law firms. The second part of the article covers how home-working patterns have become the preferable option to working in the office. Finally, the author takes a change management approach, addressing what information professionals need to do to best manage and embed the change so as to continue to play a key part of the future, post-pandemic, law firm business.