The 20 most recently published documents
Matthias Varga von Kibéd und Insa Sparrer unterscheiden zwischen drei verschiedenen Aufstellungsmethoden (Sparrer und Varga von Kibéd, o. D.): Der spezifisch (konkreten), der virtuellen und der prototypischen Aufstellung. Bei spezifischen Aufstellungen wird ein konkretes Anliegen eines Klienten betrachtet. Im Gegensatz dazu, werden bei virtuellen Aufstellungen eine Übungsumgebung geschaffen. In dieser können Aufstellungstechniken und Interventionsmethoden geübt werden. Bei prototypischen Strukturaufstellungen werden Themen zusammengefasst, die mehrere Teilnehmer im Seminar berühren bzw. in deren Alltag immer wieder auftreten können. Dieses Thema wird wie eine spezifische Aufstellung bearbeitet jedoch ohne ein konkretes vorliegendes Anliegen. Beispiele für prototypische Strukturaufstellungen kommen aus vielen Bereichen z.B. dem Führungsalltag, Teamentwicklung, Konfliktmanagement, Gesprächsführung, Zeit‐ und Selbstmanagement.
Sol-Gel basierte Flammschutzmittel stellen einen vielversprechenden Ansatz für Textilien dar, gerade im Bereich des Ersatzes von derzeit etablierten halogenhaltigen Flammschutzmitteln. Letztere sind aufgrund ihrer toxikologisch Bedenklichkeit sowie ihrer mitunter bioakkumulierenden Eigenschaften in die Kritik geraten. In diesem Forschungsvorhaben wurde daher untersucht auf welche Weise ein Flammschutz per Sol-Gel-Ansatz auf Stickstoff- und/oder Phosphorbasis als halogenfreie Alternative verwirklicht werden kann. Die Sol-Gel-Schicht fungierte dabei zum einen als nicht brennbarer Binder, zum anderen konnten über das Einführen entsprechender funktioneller Seitenketten für den Flammschutz aktive Gruppen direkt mit eingebunden werden. Verschiedene Ansätze wurden dabei verfolgt. Vor allem durch die Nutzung von additivierten Systemen, d.h. durch Sol-Gel-Schichten mit Zusätzen von stickstoff- und/oder phosphorhaltigen Verbindungen konnte ein Flammschutz nach DIN EN ISO 15025 (Schutzkleidung – Schutz gegen Hitze und Flammen) erhalten werden. Anhand eines Modellsystems, bei dem in zwei aufeinanderfolgenden Schritten zuerst eine funktionalisierte Sol-Gel-Schicht und anschließend eine Phosphorverbindung in einem zweiten Schritt aufgebracht wurde, konnten die Vorteile des Flammschutzes auf Sol-Gel-Basis nachgewiesen werden. Dabei wurde unter anderem auch gezeigt, dass ein Mechanismus auf Basis der Bildung einer Schutzschicht hauptsächlich verantwortlich für den Flammschutz ist. Dieses Ergebnis ist für eine zukünftige, weitere Optimierung entsprechender Ausrüstungen nicht zu unterschätzen. Durch Ausrüstungsversuche im semi-industriellen Maßstab konnte weiterhin gezeigt werden, dass einer großtechnischen Umsetzung der angewandten Ausrüstungen prinzipiell nichts im Wege steht. Abstriche müssen bis dato lediglich bezüglich der Waschstabilität gemacht werden. Die Sol-Gel-Schichten überstanden zwar im allgemeinen typische Waschprozesse, eine Permanenz der Flammfestigkeit von additivierten Systemen ergab sich aber nur in einzelnen Fällen. Ausgehend von den Ergebnissen wurde ein neuer Ansatz vorgestellt, der über den hier zugrundeliegenden Ansatz hinausgeht. Dieser sieht vor, durch den Einsatz von neu-synthetisierten Silanen mit Stickstoff- und Phosphorgruppen Sol-Gel-Schichten herzustellen, die ein vielversprechendes Verhalten zeigen. Hier konnte auch nach ersten Waschtests eine Aufrechterhaltung der verbesserten Flammfestigkeit nachgewiesen werden. Insgesamt konnte innerhalb des Forschungsvorhabens gezeigt werden, dass ein Flammschutz auf Sol-Gel-Basis für Textilien erhalten werden kann. Darüberhinaus konnte auch erklärt werden auf welchem Mechanismus dieser Flammschutz begründet ist und wie die derzeit noch ungenügende Waschpermanenz verbessert werden kann.
Customer foresight is a relatively new research field. We introduce the customer foresight territory by discussing it localization between customer research and foresight research. For this purposse, we look at a variety of methods that help to understand customers and future realities. On this basis we provide an overwiew of customer foresight methods and outline an ideal-typical research journey.
This study investigates how integrated reporting (IR) creates value for investors. It examines how providers of financial capital benefit from an improved firm information environment provided by IR. Specifically, this study investigates the effect of voluntary IR disclosure on analyst earnings forecast accuracy as well as on firm value. To do so, we use an international sample of 167 listed companies that voluntarily publish an integrated report. Our analysis shows no significant effect of a voluntary IR publication on analyst earnings forecast accuracy and no significant effect on firm value. We thus do not find evidence for the fulfillment of IR's promises regarding improved information environment and value creation of voluntary adopters. We conclude that such companies might already have a relatively high level of transparency leading to an absent additional effect of IR disclosure. Positive effects of IR appear to be more relevant in environments where IR is mandatory.
The key aim of Open Strategy is to open up the process of strategy development to larger groups within and even outside an organization. Furthermore, Open Strategy aims to include broad groups of stakeholders in the various steps of the strategy process. The question at hand is how can Open Strategy be achieved? What approaches can be used? Scenario planning and business wargaming are approaches perceived as relevant tools in the field of strategy and strategic foresight and in the context of Open Strategy because of their participative nature. The aim of this article is to assess to what degree scenario planning and business wargaming can be used in the context of Open Strategy. While these approaches are suitable, their current application limits the number of potential participants. Further research and experimentation in practice with larger groups and/or online approaches, or a combination of both, are needed to explore the potential of scenario planning and business wargaming as tools for Open Strategy.
Globalisation, shorter product life cycles, and increasing product varieties have led to complex supply chains. At the same time, there is a growing interest of customers and governments in having a greater transparency of brands, manufacturers, and producers throughout the supply chain. Due to the complex structure of collaborative manufacturing networks, the increase of supply chain transparency is a challenge for manufacturing companies. The blockchain technology offers an innovative solution to increase the transparency, security, authenticity, and auditability of products. However, there are still uncertainties when applying the blockchain technology to manufacturing scenarios and thus enable all stakeholders to trace back each component of an assembled product. This paper proposes a framework design to increase the transparency and auditability of products in collaborative manufacturing networks by adopting the blockchain technology. In this context, each component of a product is marked with a unique identification number generated by blockchain-based smart contracts. In this way, a transparent auditability of assembled products and their components can be achieved for all stakeholders, including the custome.
Companies are becoming aware of the potential risks arising from sustainability aspects in supply chains. These risks can affect ecological, economic or social aspects. One important element in managing those risks is improved transparency in supply chains by means of digital transformation. Innovative technologies like blockchain technology can be used to enforce transparency. In this paper, we present a smart contract-based Supply Chain Control Solution to reduce risks. Technological capabilities of the solution will be compared to a similar technology approach and evaluated regarding their benefits and challenges within the framework of supply chain models. As a result, the proposed solution is suitable for the dynamic administration of complex supply chains.
We propose a method for recognizing dynamic gestures using a 3D sensor. New aspects of the developed system include problem-adapted data conversion and compression as well as automatic detection of different variants of the same gesture via clustering with a suitable metric inspired by Jaccard metric. The combination of Hidden Markov Models and clustering leads to robust detection of different executions based on a small set of training data. We achieved an increase of 5% recognition rate compared to regular Hidden Markov Models. The system has been used for human-machine interaction and might serve as an assistive system in physiotherapy and neurological or orthopedic diagnosis.
Urban platforms are essential for smart and sustainable city planning and operation. Today they are mostly designed to handle and connect large urban data sets from very different domains. Modelling and optimisation functionalities are usually not part of the cities software infrastructure. However, they are considered crucial for transformation scenario development and optimised smart city operation. The work discusses software architecture concepts for such urban platforms and presents case study results on the building sector modelling, including urban data analysis and visualisation. Results from a case study in New York are presented to demonstrate the implementation status.
In networked operating room environments, there is an emerging trend towards standardized non-proprietary communication protocols which allow to build new integration solutions and flexible human-machine interaction concepts. The most prominent endeavor is the IEEE 11073 SDC protocol. For some uses cases, it would be helpful if not just medical devices could be controlled based on SDC, but also building automation systems like light, shutters, air condition, etc. For those systems, the KNX protocol is widely used. We build an SDC-to-KNX gateway which allows to use the SDC protocol for sending commands to connected KNX devices. The first prototype system was successfully implemented at the demonstration operating room at Reutlingen University. This is a first step toward the integration of a broader variety of KNX devices.
Documentation of clinical processes, especially in the perioperative are, is a base requirement for quality of service. Nonetheless, the documentation is a burden for the medical staff since it distracts from the clinical core process. An intuitive and user-friendly documentation system could increase documentation quality and reduce documentation workload. The optimal system solution would know what happened and the person documenting the step would need a single “confirm” button. In many cases, such a linear flow of activities is given as long as only one profession (e.g. anaestesiology, scrub nurse) is considered, but even in such cases, there might be derivations from the linear process flow and further interaction is required.
Intraoperative brain deformation, so called brain shift, affects the applicability of preoperative magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) data to assist the procedures of intraoperative ultrasound (iUS) guidance during neurosurgery. This paper proposes a deep learning-based approach for fast and accurate deformable registration of preoperative MRI to iUS images to correct brain shift. Based on the architecture of 3D convolutional neural networks, the proposed deep MRI-iUS registration method has been successfully tested and evaluated on the retrospective evaluation of cerebral tumors (RESECT) dataset. This study showed that our proposed method outperforms other registration methods in previous studies with an average mean squared error (MSE) of 85. Moreover, this method can register three 3D MRI-US pair in less than a second, improving the expected outcomes of brain surgery.
Checklists are a valuable tool to ensure process quality and quality of care. To ensure proper integration in clinical processes, it would be desirable to generate checklists directly from formal process descriptions. Those checklists could also be used for user interaction in context-aware surgical assist systems. We built a tool to automatically convert Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) process models to checklists displayed as HTML websites. Gateways representing decisions are mapped to checklist items that trigger dynamic content loading based on the placed checkmark. The usability of the resulting system was positively evaluated regarding comprehensibility and end-user friendliness.
At DBKDA 2019, we demonstrated that StrongDBMS with simple but rigorous optimistic algorithms, provides better performance in situations of high concurrency than major commercial database management systems (DBMS). The demonstration was convincing but the reasons for its success were not fully analysed. There is a brief account of the results below. In this short contribution, we wish to discuss the reasons for the results. The analysis leads to a strong criticism of all DBMS algorithms based on locking, and based on these results, it is not fanciful to suggest that it is time to re-engineer existing DBMS.
Due to digitalization, constant technological progress and ever shorter product life cycles, enterprises are currently facing major challenges. In order to succeed in the market, business models have to be adapted more often and more quickly to changing market conditions than they used to be. Fast adaptability, also called agility, is a decisive competitive factor in today’s world. Because of the ever-growing IT part of products and the fact that they are manufactured using IT, changing the business model has a major impact on the enterprise architecture (EA). However, developing EAs is a very complex task, because many stakeholders with conflicting interests are involved in the decision-making process. Therefore, a lot of collaboration is required. To support organizations in developing their EA, this article introduces a novel integrative method that systematically integrates stakeholder interests into decision-making activities. By using the method, collaboration between stakeholders involved is improved by identifying points of contact between them. Furthermore, standardized activities make decision-making more transparent and comparable without limiting creativity.
By 2019, German-based Kärcher, "the world's leading provider of cleaning technology", hat turned its professional cleaning devices into digital offerings. The data generated by these connected cleaning devices formed a key ingredient in the company's ongoing strategic shift in its B2B business: Kärcher was transforming from a seller of cleaning devices to a provider of consulting services in order to help professional cleaning companies improve their cleaning processes.
The case illustrates how the company learned to generate value from digital offerings. And it demonstrates how a family-owned company transformed its organization in order to be able to more effectively develop and provide digital offerings, while adding roles and developing technology platforms, as well as changing structures and ways of working.
Enterprises are currently transforming their strategy, processes, and their information systems to extend their degree of digitalization. The potential of the Internet and related digital technologies, like Internet of Things, services computing, cloud computing, artificial intelligence, big data with analytics, mobile systems, collaboration networks, and cyber physical systems both drives and enables new business designs. Digitalization deeply disrupts existing businesses, technologies and economies and fosters the architecture of digital environments with many rather small and distributed structures. This has a strong impact for new value producing opportunities and architecting digital services and products guiding their design through exploiting a Service-Dominant Logic. The main result of the book chapter extends methods for integral digital strategies with value-oriented models for digital products and services which are defined in the framework of a multi-perspective digital enterprise architecture reference model.
This chapter presents an introduction to the emerging trends for architecting the digital transformation having a strong focus on digital products, intelligent services, and related systems together with methods, models and architectures. The primary aim of this book is to highlight some of the most recent research results in the field. We are providing a focused set of brief descriptions of the chapters included in the book.
The digital transformation is today’s dominant business transformation having a strong influence on how digital services and products are designed in a service-dominant way. A popular underlying theory of value creation and economic exchange that is known as the service-dominant (S-D) logic can be connected to many successful digital business models. However, S-D logic by itself is abstract. Companies cannot directly use it as an instrument for business model innovation and design in an easy way. To address this a comprehensive ideation method based on S-D logic is proposed, called service-dominant design (SDD). SDD is aimed at supporting firms in the transition to a service- and value-oriented perspective. The method provides a simplified way to structure the ideation process based on four model components. Each component consists of practical implications, auxiliary questions and visualization techniques that were derived from a literature review, a use case evaluation of digital mobility and a focus group discussion. SDD represents a first step of having a toolset that can support established companies in the process of service- and value-orientation as part of their digital transformation efforts.
