Search results

This paper aims to study a circular economy business model that offers services with embedded information exchange capabilities to extend product life through maintenance and repair. Information exchange has been identified as a critical factor in advancing the principles of a circular economy, and this research was conducted to illustrate how information exchange can facilitate maintenance and repair.

The study has a case study approach of collecting data through semi-structured interviews and questionnaires.

Information exchange on what and when to do something engages end-users in maintenance and facilitates learning. For repair, the problem description and possible solutions are information that must be exchanged. Both types of information exchange are facilitated by simple tech solutions relying on known and inexpensive technology (e.g. e-mail service, video call and text messaging).

The study contributes to the organisational development and knowledge management fields with novel insights on how information exchange and circular economy are related and can be facilitated.

The study provides insights for companies looking for solutions on how to generate revenue from services and reduce resource consumption. The findings of the study suggest that the development of circular business models does not always require expensive high-tech solutions.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is unique as it is empirically based on insights into how information exchange can extend product life through the use of simple digital tools.

Enterprise social media (ESM) platforms are rapidly diffusing in the business context because they can bring substantial benefits to companies by enhancing their knowledge management (KM) processes. However, such benefits materialize only if active employee participation is ensured. Therefore, it is crucial to understand how individual employees use an ESM platform to assist their knowledge-related activities. This paper contributes to this topic by proposing a classification of ESM users based on two dimensions: frequency and type (active or passive) of use.

The paper presents the results of a survey of 262 employees of an international engineering service company that has adopted an ESM platform to support its KM processes. Statistical methods (e.g. ANOVA, Tukey’s b) were applied to verify the usefulness of the proposed typology and identify the main aspects that characterize the different user groups.

The survey results confirm the existence of different types of ESM users and provide the empirical basis for developing a bi-dimensional classification from which four user groups were derived and characterized: frequent contributors, sporadic contributors, frequent lurkers and sporadic lurkers.

The main limitation is that only one company in one sector with specific knowledge needs and capabilities was investigated.

The study provides useful suggestions for how to promote the use of an ESM and particularly for how to encourage less frequent and less active users to increase their participation in a platform.

The paper contributes to a better understanding of how employees approach ESM by identifying factors that characterize different user groups.

This paper aims to study the impact of intentionally developed communities of practice (CoPs) on knowledge sharing and practice improvement in an administrative public sector organisation (PSO).

A case study approach was used to analyse the impact of the CoPs intentionally developed by four different teams at a Danish PSO. The study applied a CoP development framework suggested by the literature to develop the CoPs.

Three out of the four CoPs were successfully developed, and they positively affected knowledge sharing and practice improvement. CoP participants engaged in conversations to explore individual ways of working, share knowledge and ultimately improve practice. Standardisation and boundary spanning were identified as contextual factors influencing the CoP activities.

The findings verify the framework and contribute to a better understanding of the factors affecting the development of CoPs that positively impact knowledge sharing and practice improvements in a PSO context.

The study provides operations managers in PSOs with a framework for developing CoPs to improve work performance through better knowledge sharing among employees.

The paper provides case study evidence for the relevance of CoPs in PSO settings and highlights the necessity of investing resources in employee knowledge-sharing interactions.

The purpose of this paper is to outline a theoretical framework that can be used to understand coach dismissals in professional football.

In order to embed the suggested framework empirically and thereby strengthen the argumentation, a total of 90 management accounts from 18 Danish professional football clubs have been analyzed using a qualitative content analysis approach. The accounts cover a period of five consecutive seasons.

The analysis shows that dismissing the coach is a frequent occurrence in Danish clubs. This finding is included in the discussion, in which it is suggested that a coach dismissal may be the outcome of mimetic, coercive or normative isomorphism.

The applied methodology makes it difficult to assess whether coach dismissals actually stem from institutional forces. A more extensive research design and methodological setup is required in order to elaborate the proposed framework.

By focussing on the dynamics of club-stakeholder relationships, the proposed framework can be seen as an attempt to clarify key features of the decision-making process surrounding coach dismissals in European professional football. Furthermore, the framework suggests that in order for a club to stay attractive to its stakeholders, and thereby increase its chances of securing future financial support, club directors should pay attention to their external environment.

In contrast to existing research, this study does not aim at assessing whether a coach dismissal pays off in terms of wins on the pitch. Instead, a qualitative approach has been selected in order to offer a framework that aims at providing an in-depth understanding of coach dismissals in professional football.

The complexity of manufacturing systems, on-going production and existing constraints on the shop floor remain among the main challenges for the analysis, design and development of the models in product, process and factory domains. The potential of different virtual factory (VF) tools and approaches to support simultaneous engineering for the design, and development of these domains has been addressed in the literature. To fulfil this potential, there is a need for an approach which integrates the product, process and production systems for designing and developing VF and its validation in real-life cases. This paper aims to present an integrated design approach for VF design and development, as well as a demonstration implemented in a wind turbine manufacturing plant.

As the research calls for instrumental knowledge to discover the effects of intervention on the operations of an enterprise, design science research methodology is considered to be a well-suited methodology for exploring practical usefulness of a generic design to close the theory–practice gap. The study was planned as an exploratory research activity which encompassed the simultaneous design and development of artefacts and retrospective analysis of the design and implementation processes. The extended VF concept, architecture, a demonstration and procedures followed during the research work are presented and evaluated.

The artefacts (models and methods) and the VF demonstrator, which was evaluated by industry experts and scholars based on the role of the VF in improving the performance in the evaluation and reconfiguration of new or existing factories, reduce the ramp-up and design times, supporting management decisions. Preliminary results are presented and discussed.

The concept VF model, its architecture and general methodology as an integrated design and development approach, can be adopted and used for VF design and development both for discrete and continuous manufacturing plants. The development and demonstration were limited, however, because real-time synchronisation, 3D laser scanning data and a commonly shared data model, to enable the integration of different VF tools, were not achievable.

The paper presents a novel VF concept and architecture, which integrates product, process and production systems. Moreover, design and development methods of the concept and its demonstration for a wind turbine manufacturing plant are presented. The paper, therefore, contributes to the information systems and manufacturing engineering field by identifying a novel concept and approach to the effective design and development of a VF and its function in the analysis, design and development of manufacturing systems.