A design science approach for enhancing efficiency at an industrial automation firm

Abstract

The thesis work described in this document was carried out over a period of six months at a leading industrial automation company located in Denmark. The company provides their customers with software and hardware needed to enable automation. The thesis work was carried out in order to discover, analyse and solve known but undocumented and unknown problems in the product lifecycle. It was evident that there existed various problems along the entire product lifecycle in the company. Interviews, meetings and workshops conducted revealed the various problems. Once the problems were documented and analysed, a solution called ‘Lifecycle Tool’ was designed and documented. ‘Lifecycle Tool’ looks at the entire production lifecycle of an industrial automation solution and acts as an additional layer. This layer facilitates structured communication, visualization and code generation. A high-level architecture of the ‘Lifecycle Tool’ designed in the thesis work acts as a proposed solution to certain issues faced by the firm. Also, certain lower level details like database design and software requirements which would enable the starting of the development process of the ‘Lifecycle Tool’ are written in this thesis.