Abraham Bernstein
An earlier version of this chapter appeared as A. Bernstein (1998), The product workbench: An environment for the mass customization of production processes, Proceedings of the Workshop for Information Technology and Systems, Helsinki, Finland.
A variety of organizational observers (e.g., Argyris and Schn 1996; Boyton, Victor, and Pine 1993; Laubacher, Malone, and MIT Scenario Working Group 1997) predict new organizational forms that are presumed to be highly flexible, continuously changing their form, their product range, and their structure. Firms will evolve into more flexible forms in which the interrelations between the organizational units are not organized by a hierarchical information flow but much more by a network of communicative links (see Van Alstyne 1997). How can we support the enactment of highly flexible processes in such an organization?
While rapid prototyping environments and CASE tools have been addressing the problems of continuous change they usually produce solutions which are either not scaleable, require highly specialized knowledge or are limited to a single, proprietary enactment environment (e.g., a work flow system or a transaction monitor). This chapter reports on the implementation of a prototype system to support the rapid development of new production processes by end-users, which can then be enacted on a variety of execution platforms. Building on ideas from the product development and innovation literature, it combines concepts from rapid prototyping, component-based programming, object-oriented programming, knowledge-based systems, and human-computer interface design to develop a product workbench for business users.
The chapter is structured as follows: First, we analyze the requirements for a product workbench using foundations from the literature. Second, we describe a prototype implementation, which will be illustrated using a practical scenario from the financial services industry. Finally, we evaluate the proposed solution and discuss future work.