Early Prototyping in the Digital Industry: A Management Framework

Abstract

Part 7: Future FactoryInternational audienceA rising complexity of products, an on-going digitalization and an accelerated shift of market demands lead to a rapidly growing number of uncertainties in business environments. Firms require new approaches to deal with these challenges and have to take a proactive step towards uncertainties and the mitigation of related risks. One way to do so is the adoption of iterative, learning-oriented methods and practices in order to incrementally adapt to rapidly changing environments and customer demands, arising for example, from digital transformation and industry 4.0. “Early Prototyping” and “Business Experiments” constitute two of those methods. In this paper we introduce an integrated and more general perspective on managing iterative methods within new product and service development projects. As a result, we are able to present a comprehensive framework for the management of early prototyping that has sufficient practical relevance and can answer current, practical challenges

How Digital Twins Enable the Next Level of PLM – A Guide for the Concept and the Implementation in the Internet of Everything Era

“…Before deciding to go "all in" and invest into solutions that run in real operations, it is crucial to build prototypes that are mature enough that they can be piloted internally [7]. Also, for digital twins to be used across the organization, we see an organic implementation as more successful especially with internal acceptance compared to a tradition top-down approach of implementation [14]. There are four success factors for the prototyping stage:…”

“…Each prototype shall be piloted for a few months inside the organization, allowing internal and external users to provide qualitative and quantitative feedback [14]. This helps to design and develop the strategy of large scale implementation.…”