Empirical studies show that adaptations of existing agile methods are necessary for developing physical products creating obstacles and challenges. This paper aggregates the gathered findings from several cross-sectional industry surveys and establishes a relationship between the extent of utilization of individual agile elements based on Scrum and the need to adapt these elements in applying agile procedural models. The emphasis of examination resides in the purpose perspective of agile elements with the aim of facilitating context-specific adaptations more effectively.

Artificial Intelligence-based Computer Vision models (AI-CV models) for object detection can support various applications over the entire lifecycle of machines and plants such as monitoring or maintenance tasks. Despite ongoing research on using engineering data to synthesize training data for AI-CV model development, there is a lack of process guidelines for the creation of such data. This paper proposes a synthetic training data creation process tailored to the particularities of an engineering context addressing challenges such as the domain gap and methods like domain randomization.

The ongoing digitization of engineering processes and the increasing prevalence of smart products create possibilities for new business models and services. Digital twins enable the collection of all required data about a smart product in order to make these possibilities a reality. This paper describes a flexible approach towards a digital product twin that is tightly integrated with existing product models while being lightweight and easy to integrate with existing IT solutions.

Neglecting challenges of distributed collaboration can lead to significant efficiency and effectiveness losses in agile, distributed development teams. The EDiT method provides support for improving distributed collaboration of development teams. To ensure acceptance, applicability, and contribution to success in industrial development practice, it is necessary to validate the EDiT method. The goal of this contribution is the development of a process model for early and incremental validation of the EDiT method in the field finally leading to a validation of the EDiT method itself.

A central part of the design process is collaboration, harnessing specialist expertise often in meetings. We understand relatively little about how meetings serve teams of designers and their work and this study uses soft systems methodology to attempt to create structures that describe and explain meetings. The results suggest extension of the boundary of interest and suggest a conceptual framework which reveals some under-addressed stages and activities which may help designers improve their meetings.

Increasing complexity of products and design processes leads to intensive collaboration of different stakeholders in technical product development. This causes a demand for suitable methods of collaboration across department interfaces, as between design and simulation. The paper investigates typical barriers of collaboration at this interface and measures to overcome them. Methods of complexity management form links based on literature and empirical data from online surveys and interview studies. The framework uses a set of structural metrics to analyse collaboration networks systematically.

Engineer-To-Order (ETO) companies develop complex one-of-a-kind products based on specific customer demands. Given the product uniqueness, the commissioning plays an important role in the product development process. However, the project variety and low data availability hinder the analysis of the commissioning processes. This paper proposes a framework for the structured analysis of commissioning processes in ETO companies by analysing the impacts from product requirements and design on the commissioning performance. A case study presents the practical application of the developed framework.

Modern products are often developed in local distributed teams involving various engineering domains. As a result, product development processes are characterized by a high degree of complexity and individuality. However, the project context is often not integrated into the project planning, which can lead to uncertainties in the processes. In addition, reflection does not take place adequately in process execution. Therefore, this paper presents a concept for agile process design that enables reducing uncertainties based on context-specific reflections and adapting the processes.

Reflection is understood as an integral part of designing and design processes. Despite the high relevance and an ongoing discussion about agile engineering, we found that reflection is rarley established in industrial practice. There is a need for an approach structuring the wide range of levels, stakeholders, objects and timing of reflections. The introduced RECAP framework is an important step towards a guideline (heuristic) for reflection in engineering projects. Based on the four dimensions objectives, stakeholders, objects, and processes it supports structured planning of reflection.

Industrial automotive development differs significantly from ideal agile conditions. Complex development structures, interlinkages between teams and non-functional physical dependencies between components result in agile constraints of scale and physicality. This qualitative study researches the influence of the product integration process on these constraints. The results show, that automotive integration characteristics such as duration, frequency, scope and transparency fail agile requirements and therefore cause constraints. Alternatives regarding IT and process design are discussed.

The use of after-action reviews (AARs) following major emergency events, such as a disaster, is common and mandated for hospitals and similar organizations. There is a recurrent challenge of identified problems not being resolved and repeated in subsequent events. A process improvement technique called a rapid improvement event (RIE) was used to conduct an AAR following a complete information technology (IT) outage at a large urban hospital. Using RIE methodology to conduct the AAR allowed for the rapid development and implementation of major process improvements to prepare for future IT downtime events. Thus, process improvement methodology, particularly the RIE, is suited for conducting AARs following disasters and holds promise for improving outcomes in emergency management.

LittleCM, McStayC, OethJ, KoehlerA, BookmanK. Using Rapid Improvement Events for Disaster After-Action Reviews: Experience in a Hospital Information Technology Outage and Response. Prehosp Disaster Med. 2018;33(1):98–100.

Background and purpose: Due to the increased complexity of the radiotherapy process in recent years, many QA procedures have been introduced to improve the quality of the treatment preparation and the treatment delivery. Most of these procedures give no direct information on the efficiency of the overall process in the radiotherapy department. It is quite evident that the frequency of errors will affect the efficiency of the process (for instance manpower to solve the detected problems), but also affect more generally the patients' experience.

Material and methods: To make some objective assessment of the erroneous entries in the process of radiotherapy, a pilot study was initiated to report all problems during a period of 2 months on a dedicated QA form. By registration of these errors, the QA group could trace the main sources of the decrease in efficiency and increased waiting time for patients.

Results and conclusions: For 46% of the patients during the two months at least one QA forms was filled in. With these QA forms 198 erroneous entries including 33 erroneous treatments were reported. Regarding the origin of the problems, the majority (60%) were generated in the planning process, while 56% of the errors were detected at the treatment unit before or during delivery of the first fraction. In total 461 actions were undertaken to recover all the reported errors. This generated time delay for 145 patients. Extrapolating these results to a year, a 0.7 full time equivalent person is spent to recover these errors, while the total patient population waits for about 140 hours. Corrective actions have been undertaken to optimise the overall process.