Open Access

Successful software companies typically shift their organization from developing customer-specific software solutions to releasing standardized product software. This shift is called productization. It affects many internal processes and customers’ expectations. Particularly, the role-specific challenges and conflicts of software productization are mostly unattended in IS research, which motivates this paper. Based on Organizational Role Theory, the paper sheds light on the role-specific conflicts associated with changing role expectations. A case study, based on the productization transformation process of one business unit within a software company, enabled the identification of role expectations and transformation challenges. A problematization approach is employed to identify challenges of software productization from literature and our case, thereby uncovering new challenges. These are then discussed in the broader context of Organizational Role Theory.

The use of industrial robots allows the precise manipulation of all components necessary for setting up a large-scale particle image velocimetry (PIV) system. The known internal calibration matrix of the cameras in combination with the actual pose of the industrial robots and the calculated transform from the fiducial markers to camera coordinates allow the precise positioning of the individual PIV components according to the measurement demands. In addition, the complete calibration procedure for generating the external camera matrix and the mapping functions for e.g. dewarping the stereo images can be automatically determined without further user interaction and thus the degree of automation can be extended to nearly 100%. This increased degree of automation expands the applications range of PIV systems, in particular for measurement tasks with severe time constraints.

Manufacturing companies are forced to operate in an increasingly volatile and unpredictabl environment. The number of events that can have a potentially critical impact on a production system‘s economic performance have significantly increased. This forces companies to invest considerably more in flexible and robust production systems capable of withstanding a certain amount of change however unable to quantify the benefits in advance. The satisfactory quantification and assessment of these qualities – Flexibility and Robustness –has not been realized yet. This paper discusses commonality between Flexibility and Robustness and offers a new approach to connect changes in the environment with the elements of a production system and thus quantifying its flexibility and robustness.

The FAYMONVILLE case study describes how the family-owned company Faymonville from eastern Belgium has succeeded in becoming one of the leading manufacturers in its sector. The targeted identification of new markets, the focus on relevant customer needs, and a consistent product policy with a coordinated manufacturing concept lay the foundations for success. In this case study, students can learn about how a company can successfully resolve the fundamental contradiction between economic and customized production.

Prior studies demonstrate that firms need to make smart trade-off decisions between exploration and exploitation activities in order to increase performance. Chief executive officers (CEOs) are principal decision makers of a firm’s strategic posture. In this study, we theorize and empirically examine how relative exploration orientation of large publicly listed firms varies based on the career variety of their CEOs – that is, how diverse the professional experiences of executives were prior to them becoming CEOs. We further argue that the heterogeneity and structure of the top management team moderates the impact of CEO career variety on firms’ relative exploration orientation. Based on multisource secondary data for 318 S&P 500 firms from 2005 to 2015, we find that CEO career variety is positively associated with relative exploration orientation. Interestingly, CEOs with high career varieties appear to be less effective in pursuing exploration, when they work with highly heterogeneous and structurally interdependent top management teams.