Vapastii ohjelmoitavan automaatioyksikön suunnitteluprosessi

Rakennusautomaatiossa tulee esiin sovelluksia, joissa järjestelmän ohjaus-, säätö- tai valvontaratkaisun toteuttaminen ohjelmoitavilla logiikoilla ei ole riittävän edullista. Tällöin vaihtoehtona on oman laitteen suunnittelu. Työn tavoitteena oli suunnitella ja toteuttaa kustannustehokas CAN-väylään liitettävä vapaasti ohjelmoitava automaatioyksikkö. Suunnittelua ohjasivat asiakkaan laatimat vaatimusmäärittelyt. Niistä laitteen konfigurointimahdollisuudet ja piirilevyn tavoitekoko asettivat suurimmat haasteet laitteen suunnittelulle. Työn tuloksena toteutettiin asiakkaan tarpeisiin soveltuva automaatioyksikkö. Tavoitteisiin päästiin komponenttivalinnoilla ja hyödyntämällä tehokkaasti mikro-ohjaimen integroituja ominaisuuksia. Näiden avulla pystyttiin karsimaan monia yksiköitä, joita tavanomaisesti toteutetaan erilliskomponenteilla. Työssä perehdyttiin sulautetun järjestelmän elektroniikan tuotekehitysprosessiin ideasta prototyyppiin. Samalla on kuvailtu valittuja ratkaisuja sekä suunnittelussa tapahtuneita virheitä ja miten ne on ratkaistu.

Managing Customer Issues through a Support Channel Network

The importance of after-sales service or service in general can be seen and experienced by customers every day with industrial as well as other non-industrial services or products. This dissertation, drawing on theory and experience, focuses on practical engineering implications, specifically the management of customer issues in the after-sales phase in the mobile phone arena. The main objective of this doctoral dissertation is to investigate customer after-sales issue management, specifically regarding mobile phones. The case studies focus on issue resolution time and the issue of corrective actions. This dissertation consists of a main body and four peer-reviewed journal articles and one manuscript currently under review by a peer-reviewed journal. The main body of this dissertation examines the elements of customer satisfaction, loyalty, and retention with respect to corrective actions to address customer issues and issue resolution time through literature and empirical studies. The five independent works are case studies supporting the thesis research questions. This study examines four questions: 1) What are the factors affecting corrective actions for customers? 2) How can customer issue resolution time be controlled? 3) What are the factors affecting processes in the service chain? and 4) How can communication be measured in a service chain? In this work, both quantitative and qualitative analysis methods are used. The main body of the thesis reviews the literature regarding the elements that bridge the five case studies. The case studies of the articles and surveys lean more toward the methodology of critical positivism and then apply the interpretive approach in interpreting the results. The case study articles employ various statistical methods to analyze and to interpret the empirical and survey data. The statistical methods were used to create a model that is useful for significantly optimizing issue resolution time. Moreover, it was found that samples for verifying issues provided by the customer neither improve the perceived quality of corrective actions nor the perceived quality of issue resolution time. The term “service” in this work is limited to the technical services that are provided by product manufacturers and after-sales authorized service vendors. On the basis of this research work, it has been observed that corrective actions and issue resolution time are associated with customer satisfaction and hence, according to induction theory, to customer loyalty and retention. This thesis utilizes knowledge of marketing and customer relationships to contribute to the existing body of knowledge concerning information and communication technology for after-sales service recovery of mobile terminals. The established models in the thesis contribute to the existing knowledge of the after-sales process of dealing with customer issues in the field of mobile phones. The findings suggest that process managers could focus more on communication and training provided to the staff as new technology evolves rapidly. The study also suggest the managers formulate strategies for how customers can be kept informed on a regular basis of the status of issues that have been escalated for corrective action. The findings also lay the foundation for the comprehensive objective to control the entire product development process, starting with conceptualization. This implies that robust design should be applied to the new products so that problems affecting customer service quality are not repeated. The objective will be achieved when the entire service chain from product development to the final user can be modeled and this model can be used to support the organization at all levels.

Customer value assessment in business markets

Understanding how firms create, communicate, and deliver value to customers is a key factor when firms seek to differentiate in increasingly competitive and commoditized business markets. As product and price have become less important differentiators in many industries, suppliers are increasingly seeking ways to differentiate themselves based on delivered customer value. Therefore, to gain a holistic understanding on what their offerings are worth to the customer, suppliers need to conduct customer value assessment, which quantifies the impact of a supplier´s offering to customers’ costs and returns. However, from a managerial perspective, customer value assessment is the single most critical challenge for firms in business markets. Consequently, developing holistic frameworks for customer value assessment is seen as one of the most important research priorities for marketing research. The purpose of this study is to explore the process of customer value assessment in business markets. Business markets represent a context where an increasing number of industrial firms are transitioning from basic product offerings towards service-based and solution-oriented hybrid offerings, which emphasize value co-creation and realization in the long term, thus making it difficult to quantify their monetary value. This study employs exploratory and qualitative research design by applying inductive and discovery-oriented grounded theory and multiple case research methods. The empirical data comprise interviews with 61 managers from 12 industrial firms, including seven best practice firms in customer value assessment. The findings of this study show that customer value assessment is essentially a crossfunctional process, which involves several organizational functions. The process begins well before and continues long after the actual delivery, often until the end of a supplier´s offering’s life-cycle. Furthermore, the findings shed light on alternative strategies that firms in business markets can adopt to implement the customer value assessment process. Overall, the findings contribute to customer value research, the sales and organizational management literature, the service marketing and solutions business literature, and suggest several managerial implications on how firms in business markets can adopt a holistic approach to assess value created for customers.

Esimies osaamisen mahdollistajana

Tämän pro gradu -tutkielman tavoitteena oli esitellä ja analysoida osaami-sen johtamista sekä tuottaa käytännön suosituksia Alko Oy:n myymälöiden lähiesimiehille heidän henkilökuntansa osaamisen kehittämiseksi. Tämän lisäksi tutkimuksessa pyrittiin kerätyn aineiston avulla luomaan ymmärrys siitä, miten osaamisen johtamiset keinot vaikuttavat asiakastyytyväisyyteen. Tutkimus toteutettiin vertailevana tapaustutkimuksena ja tutkimusaineistoa kerättiin sekä kvantitatiivisella että kvalitatiivisella tutkimusmenetelmällä. Kohdeyrityksen myyjille lähetettiin kyselylomake heidän esimiestensä osaamisen johtamisen toimista, ja kyselystä saadun tiedon syventämiseksi haastateltiin kahdeksaa myymäläpäällikköä osaamisen johtamisen teemoista. Tutkimuksen perusteella pystyttiin muodostaman käsitys siitä, mistä osaa-misen johtaminen koostuu ja miten paremman ja heikomman osaamisen omaavien myymälöiden esimiesten toimet eroavat toisistaan. Vastausten perusteella saatiin myös ymmärrys niistä osa-alueista, joita kohdeyrityksen esimiesten toiminnassa pitäisi pyrkiä kehittämään. Osaamisen kehittämisen perustan muodostavat esimiehen oma esimerkki ja oppimiseen kannustava ilmapiiri. Esimies, joka onnistuu suuntaamaan henkilökuntansa oppimisen tukemaan organisaation tavoitteita, osaa henkilökohtaistaa yhtiön strategian sopimaan jokaisen toimenkuvaan. Oppimisen tukemisessa vaaditaan esimieheltä vahvaa henkilökunnan tuntemusta, tavoitteiden asettamista ja niiden toteutumisen seurantaa. Tutkimus osoitti esimiesten olevan pääsääntöisesti innostuneita työstään ja onnistuvan osaamisen suuntaamisen toimissa hyvin. Esimiehet voisivat kehittää toimintaansa ottamalla oman henkilökuntansa mukaan toiminnan suunnitteluun ja vastuuttamalla heitä myymälän toiminnan ja oman ammattitaitonsa jatkuvaan kehittämiseen.

Toward a-state-of-the-art IR copyright management system: a needs assessment

Presentation at Open Repositories 2014, Helsinki, Finland, June 9-13, 2014

Factors Affecting Customer Profitability: a Bibliometric Study

The first objective of the thesis is to find out which factors impact on customer profitability has been studied in scientific articles. The second objective is to find out the main authors and publishers from the subject area. Expectations were to find factors from marketing and management accounting literature, but this study did not succeed to gather management accounting perspective on the subject area. This study used bibliometric methods. The data for this study was collected manually from Scopus and Web of Science databases. Search words resulted 770 articles and from those 82 were included to further analyze. Descriptive analysis, citation analysis and content analysis were made. Bibexcel and Pajek software were used in this study. Publication activity was concentrated on years 2004-2013. The most productive author around the subject area is Kumar Vipin from Georgia State University (USA). A multiple customer profitability factors were identified. A lot of research was made for example about satisfaction, relationship duration, loyalty, marketing actions and customer equity drivers. The research is concentrated on service sector. The results are suggesting that there are research gaps in business-to-business and manufacturing sector.

Development of sales invoicing process in industrial services

The objective of this Master’s thesis is to find ways to streamline the invoicing process of the case company. In order to streamline the process, the bottlenecks and development areas of the present invoicing process needs to be identified. The bottlenecks are based on interviews made to personnel. The thesis also offers solutions to overcome the identified bottlenecks. The problem is the slowness of the invoicing process which should get rid off. The slow invoicing process causes delays in obtaining payments. There are many reasons for the slowness and inefficiency of the invoicing process. One of the biggest reasons is that the information systems are not deployed entirely. It causes additional work for everyone. Practices with the customers affect also to the smooth flow of invoicing. The contracts determine when the customer can be invoiced but also work approvals, missing work orders and customer’s own invoicing basis slow the process. The fastest and cheapest solution is to deploy the systems better and do things correctly. Thus duplicated work would decrease and resources would be saved. The work allocation should be modified and the practices with customer should be influenced too. In the future the meaning of IT should be highlighted and new devices exploited.

Collaborative Customer Relationship Management in Business-to-Business Firm's Strategy

The objective of this thesis is to study the presence of collaborative customer relationship management in a firm’s strategy. In addition the thesis explains specific implementations of collaborative CRM, and CRM in general, by each case company. The sample consists of five Finnish business-to-business companies through applying multiple-case study method. The data is collected through face-to-face interviews with employees knowledgeable of the case company’s CRM processes. The qualitative data is analyzed through coding and shows that two out of five case companies have adopted and are using collaborative CRM in their strategy and operations. These case companies see collaborative CRM as an important driver for the company, through customer focus and market orientation. The rest of the case companies are either in the process of moving towards collaborative CRM or have given little consideration to it. The results show that collaborative CRM is in use, and that each company modifies it to meet their exact aspirations. The major challenge in the process is to fully grasp the importance of a shared vision that can translate into collaborative efforts in CRM and business strategy.

What do Sports Sponsors Really Want? The effects of service quality, service value and customer satisfaction on behavioral intentions in sports sponsorship context

The aim of this Master’s thesis was to study the antecedents of customer satisfaction and behavioral intentions and their relative relationships in the sports sponsorship context. The possible antecedents under investigation in the current research are service value and service quality. As the academic background in the sports sponsorship literature is still rather modest there was a need for further empirical testing. The theoretical part of the research builds on the existing services marketing literature with sports sponsorship and business-to-business contexts in mind. The empirical study focused on the case company Liiga-SaiPa Oy. The data for the empirical analysis was collected via quantitative online survey. The total sample consisted of 357 the case company’s business customers and a total of 80 usable responses were collected. The data was analyzed by using statistical analysis software, SPSS. According to the results of the empirical analysis the most important antecedent of behavioral intentions in the underlying context is customer satisfaction. Also service value was found to have a direct and positive relationship with behavioral intentions. Moreover no indirect relationships through satisfaction were found between service quality and service value and behavioral intentions. However both constructs of service value and service quality were diagnosed to have a direct and positive effect on customer satisfaction. Service quality was also found to be a direct antecedent of service value with other service value benefits. However a contradicting finding with the current literature was, that service value sacrifices were not found to have a significant relationship with overall service value perceptions.

Focus on the user: perception, expectations and needs

Esitys KDK-käytettävyystyöryhmän järjestämässä seminaarissa: Miten käyttäjien toiveet haastavat metatietokäytäntöjämme? / How users' expectations challenge our metadata practices? 30.9.2014.

The requirements and needs of global data usage in product lifecycle management

This study was done for ABB Ltd. Motors and Generators business unit in Helsinki. In this study, global data movement in large businesses is examined from a product data management (PDM) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) point-of-view. The purpose of this study was to understand and map out how a large global business handles its data in a multiple site structure and how it can be applied in practice. This was done by doing an empirical interview study on five different global businesses with design locations in multiple countries. Their master data management (MDM) solutions were inspected and analyzed to understand which solution would best benefit a large global architecture with many design locations. One working solution is a transactional hub which negates the effects of multisite transfers and reduces lead times. Also, the requirements and limitations of the current MDM architecture were analyzed and possible reform ideas given.  

Integrating Use of Customer Information Throughout Multiple Sales Channels to Create Customer Competence

Customer knowledge management (CKM) practices enable organizations to create customer competence with systematic use of customer information that is integrated throughout the organization. Nonetheless, organizations are not able to fully exploit the vast amount of data available. Previous research on use of customer information is limited especially in a multichannel environment. The aim of this study was to identify the main obstacles for utilizing customer information efficiently across multiple sales channels. The study was conducted as a single case study in order to gain deeper understanding of the research problem. The empirical findings indicate that lack of CKM practices and a common goal are major challenges obstructing effective utilization of customer information. Furthermore, decentralized organizational structure and insufficient analytical skills create obstacles for information sharing and capabilities to process information and create new knowledge. The implications of the study suggest that in order to create customer competence organizations should shift their focus from technology to the organizational factors affecting use of information and implement CKM practices throughout the organization.