Aldo Duchi
email: aduchi@ethz.ch

Omid Maghazei
email: omaghazei@ethz.ch

Davide Sili

Marco Bassan

Paul Schönsleben

Engineer-to-Order Enabling Process: An Empirical Analysis

Keywords: Engineer-to-Order (ETO), ETO Enabling Process, Best Practices 1

des établissements d'enseignement et de recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires publics ou privés.

Introduction

Globalization, margin shrink, increased competition, delivery-time pressure and turbulent technological advances [START_REF] Kumar | Improved new product development through enhanced design architecture for engineer-to-order companies[END_REF][START_REF] Pandit | An ontology-based approach to support decision-making for the design of ETO (Engineer-To-Order) products[END_REF] are central issues relating to the current Engineer-to-Order (ETO) environments. As a consequence, it is essential for executives to deal with such challenges in order to achieve profitable businesses. Scholars and experienced professionals put efforts to address how to react to such transformations in the competitive environment. Interestingly, they have identified a viable approach in reorganizing processes aiming at increasing operational efficiency. In this context, the introduction of product configurators is likely to optimize the trade-off between productivity and customization [START_REF] Forza | Managing for variety in the order acquisition and fulfilment process: The contribution of product configuration systems[END_REF]. Along the same lines, it visualizes final product for the customer in the bidding phase and facilitates the process of quickly generating detailed drawings. Overall, this brings the possibility of efficiently programming the manufacturing machines and in turn, increases the level of automation [START_REF] Sjøbakk | Implications of automation in engineer-to-order production: a case study[END_REF].

The companies that employed the configurator in their processes, consider the 'configured' products as 'standard' products which have been produced in Make-to-Order (MTO) settings [START_REF] Wikner | Integrating production and engineering perspectives on the customer order decoupling point[END_REF], despite the remarkable variety of products they are able to deliver. Although configurators have been widely examined in the past studies, recoveries in efficiencies out of the MTO process have been largely neglected. A recent study by Schönsleben [START_REF] Schönsleben | Methods and tools that support a fast and efficient Engineer-to-Order process for parameterized product families[END_REF] indicates that advanced ETO companies are able to implement an ETO Enabling Process that is an ad-hoc process to collect and retrieve knowledge. Nonetheless, this knowledge is not entirely standardized but is sufficiently structured to be quickly retrieved. In the next sections, we introduce the ETO Enabling Process concept and we illustrate how market leaders have adopted such process out of the boundaries of the MTO process.

2

The ETO Enabling Process

Redefinition of Standard and Non-Standard

The Solution Space (SS) is a statement of all the possible permutations of design parameters that are predefined and offered to prospective customers [START_REF] Pine | Mass customization: the new frontier in business competition[END_REF]. Value creation within a finite SS is a distinctive element of ETO companies and discriminates them from conventional craft customization [START_REF] Lampel | Customizing Customization[END_REF][START_REF] Robertson | Planning for Product Platforms[END_REF]. In fact, setting the appropriate SS directly affects the customer's perception of the utility of the customized product and determines the efficiency of downstream processes in the fulfillment system [START_REF] Tseng | The customer centric enterprise[END_REF]. Advanced ETO producers are capable of representing their SS within a configurator aiming for a more efficient way of retrieval of solutions. However, it is less likely for ETO companies to satisfy all the customers' requests just by a technical configurator and it often happens that solutions require additional manual engineering processes before being produced [START_REF] Haug | From engineer-to-order to mass customization[END_REF]. Schönsleben [START_REF] Schönsleben | Methods and tools that support a fast and efficient Engineer-to-Order process for parameterized product families[END_REF] claims that this kind of ETO companies have two classes of products. One is the "standard" products that can be engineered through the utilization of a configurator, and another is the "non-standard" products that call for manual processing since they have not been represented in the configurator. Also, he underlines that the "standard" solutions are developed in the context of an MTO process while "non-standards" are managed within an ETO process [START_REF] Willner | Globally distributed engineering processes: Making the distinction between engineer-To-order and make-To-order[END_REF].

ETO Enabling Process

ETO Enabling Process "means that queries from the ongoing ETO business process are answered through a form of know-how transfer. If additional know-how is gained during implementation, it is fed back to the enabling process in the form of lessons learnt" [START_REF] Schönsleben | Methods and tools that support a fast and efficient Engineer-to-Order process for parameterized product families[END_REF]. Therefore, the ETO Enabling Process can be considered as a model for describing the way that the SS is dynamically widened in the advanced ETO companies. The ETO Enabling Process on the one hand, generates the necessary information supporting the creation of new "non-standard" solutions; on the other hand, it generates a feedback to the ETO process under the form of lesson learnt. Each "non-standard" solution conveys, indeed, new information (the feedback of the ETO Enabling Process) that has to be adequately stored for an effective and efficient expansion of the SS. The Fig 1 shows a typical ETO business process in ETO companies (DTO stands for design-to-order which is used as a synonym of ETO). The sales phase, including quoting, is followed by the receipt of the customer's order, followed in turn by design, production and delivery [START_REF] Willner | Development of a Business Process Matrix for Structuring the Implications of Using Configurators in an Engineer-To-Order Environment[END_REF]. We can notice that at different stages, specific requests are generated by the ETO process that must be elaborated by a parallel ETO Enabling Process, which in turn delivers know-how, represented by immediate solutions to the requests and permanent lessons learnt.

Figure 1

The ETO Enabling Process [START_REF] Schönsleben | Methods and tools that support a fast and efficient Engineer-to-Order process for parameterized product families[END_REF].

Best Practices for an Effective ETO Enabling Process

During the two years research project, in cooperation with three main industrial partners from the Swiss ETO manufacturing industries (see Table 1), various methods and tools have been developed aiming for a fast and efficient ETO process. Most notably, new reference models have been conceived and best practices have been identified. In what follows we describe the case study companies taking part in the project and we continue with the different structures of the ETO Enabling Process. Finally, a concluding table is provided to summarize the striking findings.

Table 1. Case study companies: generalizability of the results

The best practices that are presented in this paper are aligned with the use of configurator. Depending on the need of the company, the configurator can be used in different phases of the solution delivery: if it is utilized in the design phase, it will be a technical configurator; otherwise if it is used only as a support for the bidding phase, it will be a sales configurator [START_REF] Mäkipää | Utilization of Design Configurators in Order Engineering[END_REF].

Company A

Company A is a large multinational enterprise, which operates in the power generation sector. The division collaborating in the research project is offering power steam tur- bines units. The business unit counts approximately 120 engineers placed in three different European countries. The unit, appointed to realize order specific engineering, accounts only for a small percentage (less than 5%) of the total turnover of the company, but is on rapid expansion. More than the 70% of the total lead time to deliver a product is due to the engineering purposes. The high diversity in terms of technology and functionalities leads to more than 5000 man-hours of engineering on average to complete a project. In fact, an engineering project is divided into subtasks that each of them refers to a specific component for the product.

Being the business unit at a low maturity stage, the utilization of the configurator is limited only to the sales phase. For what concerns the technical configuration, Company A has employed a "configuration matrix", collecting the rule of association between a few modules they have already developed. Therefore, the ETO Enabling Process for this kind of company is mainly settled to the quick retrieval of product-related information. This is achieved both through the creation of ad-hoc repositories and through the introduction of search functions fulfilled to navigate through the company's SS. In the following the company's tailored solutions have been introduced accordingly.

Naming Convention: naming convention provides a common language protocol for the product. The naming convention allows to rapidly gather relevant engineering related information like the position in the work breakdown structure (WBS), the type, the material and/or any other special attributes. Naming Convention plays a vital role in the Company A's ETO Enabling Process because when new requests are coming to the engineering stage, the process of retrieval is therefore, facilitated with substantial savings in time and cost.

Order execution configurator: this tool is utilized to acquire more information about product subassemblies and components. This information might be both technical (past drawings) and process related (list of suppliers or internal manufacturers). By filling in a small set of parameters it is, therefore, possible to find a component which is the most similar to the special request entered in the ETO process. Thus, this tool yields considerable benefits in compressing the time needed to develop customer-specific solutions.

Documentation Sharing Platform: it is a platform for the storage and sharing of documentations between the company and its suppliers/customers. One advantage is related to the storage and retrieval of old documentations. For instance, if the post-sales services are delivered many years after the delivery of the order, it provides an effective process to retrieve documents instead of having these documents stored in scattered email archives. A second advantage is the greater visibility over the documentation exchange process.

Company B

Company B is among the worldwide leaders in design, engineering, manufacturing and maintaining of freight and special elevators. The research project was conducted with the division offering high-rise elevators. The investigated business unit has more than 200 employees and acts in two different locations, in Europe and in the Asia-Pacific Area, with the 75% of the total of the realized projects. The investigated division is appointed to realize order specific engineering for customers' specifications and offering support to the sales manager. This division is attached to the technical direction of the group. A remarkable point is that the level of knowledge in the two locations is significantly different. The reason is that despite several years of trainings and group works, most of the advanced technologies and know-how are kept by the European site.

In terms of standardization, its level appears markedly high, with a considerable amount of projects designed and realized entirely within the technical configurator. The configurator has showed a great level of flexibility through the adoption of parametric product families. It is made possible by the high volume of specifications sold per year, which allows to identify communalities in the requests of customers and in turn to include new requests into the configurator.

Company B is at a mature stage, additionally its products can be considered of lower complexity compared with the two other companies. For this reason this company owes an especial configurator which is, at the same time, a sales and a technical configurator. Therefore, the ETO process at Company B is extremely advanced and a large portion of the company's product variance can be managed within an MTO process. Nonetheless, when non-standard boundary is extremely far from the company's SS, engineers are obliged to intervene with manual calculations and drawings. The following methods and tools have been applied to structure the ETO Enabling Process at Company B.

AE-PLM Process:

Application Engineering (AE) is the office at Company B responsible for the execution of non-standard orders and it is the owner of the ETO Enabling Process as the source of know-how for non-standard requests. Product Line Management (PLM), owners of the product lines, also contributes to the ETO Enabling Process as it retains the modification rights in the configurator. AE and PLM are periodically (6 months) called to collaborate and modify the configurator so that it continuously incorporates previously developed non-standard solutions. In order to optimize this process, Company B decided to formalize it. This process can be considered as a part of the ETO Enabling Process.

Frequently Asked Request Tool: The FAR (Frequently Asked Requests) tool purpose is to support Application Engineers in the identification of incoming frequent tasks. Frequent tasks are often related to the same violation in the configuration parameters (each of the configuration parameters is laying in a certain range). Therefore, by identifying frequent tasks, we obtain a rule for the modification to be applied to the configurator. The FAR Tool is used at a very early stages of the AE-PLM Process. This is an extremely advanced setting of the ETO Enabling Process, because it drives the automation to the processes related to the less standardized part of its SS.

SE-AE Process:

Sales Engineering (SE) is responsible for the MTO process at Company B. When they are not able to deal with the requests within the configurator, they ask for the assistance of AE. SE gives engineering tasks as inputs to AE and receives, as outputs, solutions to non-standard related issues. In this process, it also automatically transfers the list of all the parameter range violation (list of deviations). In the past, SE had to manually fill in the information related to the engineering tasks, this brought to incompleteness or low quality of input data for AE. Applying automation in the process of creation of engineering tasks increases efficiency of the ETO Enabling Process.

Company C

Company C is a manufacturer of asphalt mixing, concrete mixing and mineral processing plant. A tailored business unit is appointed to manage the concrete mixing plants. This includes a division taking care of operations (production), planning and engineering, a dedicated commercial unit for sales and a key account manager. It is worth mentioning that the design is taking place in three different engineering locations.

Even if the knowledge base is already widely developed, Company C's ETO Enabling Process has not already been fully developed. The extreme engineering complexity has prevented the company from reaching the same degrees of standardization as observed at Company B. Nonetheless, the company is introducing new tools and processes, aiming at reducing the amount of redundancy in operations thanks the accumulation and use of past knowledge and experience.

Task Manager: in order to avoid inefficient recycles in the ETO process the company has designed a Task Management System. Whenever an issue emerges at each stage, a solution to the request must be immediately provided by the technical office. Nonetheless, at Company C, despite the fact that the reaction to the emergent requests is effective and efficient, the reoccurrence of the same request is a waste of resources. For example, if an error in production happened because of a mistake in the drawings and these are not permanently modified, there is the possibility that the same error will take place again. The Task Manager is also, a supporting tool for successful execution of the ETO Enabling Process. The Task Manager enables the possibility for the company to turn project-specific requests into knowledge (e.g. fixed drawings) used to avoid wasteful recycles.

Sharing Platform:

The three main engineering locations are able to engineer the whole product mix offered by the company, even if they serve different markets. It is likely to happen that the two locations respond to similar requests from the customers. Subsequently, a low degree of knowledge sharing brings significant wastes in the time spent in engineering phase since it is likely that the same issues are solved twice. In order to avoid the inefficiencies deriving from low communications, the company has decided to develop a Sharing Platform in its business intranet. Hence, engineers at each location can rapidly apprised of the configurations developed in the other locations. The platform is also a communication tool, but it primarily is a knowledge repository where special requests are transformed into valuable knowledge for the whole company. This sharing platform is an interesting example because, it transforms requests into knowledge not only to transfer them, but also to reuse them in the future projects.

Summary

On the one hand, some of the aforementioned best practices (AE-PLM Process, Documentation Sharing Platform, SE-AE Process and the Task Manager) support fluent information flow between different actors. In addition, they stimulate the standardization of the information exchange that eventually make it less dependent on the key actors.

On the other hand, other best practices such as the Order Execution Configurator, the FAR Tool and the Sharing Platform, are information repository tools that create reusable knowledge. Moreover, this knowledge creation leads to shrink the non-standard solution space and in turn, offers more degrees of customization.

Table 2. Best practices summary

Enabling process Description Company A

Naming Convention A new naming convention has been developed in order to create a reference language within the company for the identification of products, sub-assemblies and components. Order Execution Configurator Dynamic Design Containers have been established. Design Containers function as maps for the retrieval of the relevant historical information related to the product parts. Documentation Sharing Platform A documentation sharing platform has been implemented. The objective of this platform is to create a single point of contact between the company and its customers/suppliers and to have a unique repository for relevant documentation (no dispersion in several mail boxes).

Company B

AE-PLM process

The interface between AE (Application Engineering) process and PLM (Product Line Management) process has been defined. A detailed definition of this interface was necessary to guarantee a rapid and accurate execution of new releases of the product configurator.

FAR Tool

An FAR (Frequently Asked Request) tool has been developed in Visual Basic in order to extrapolate relevant statistics related to the requests in order to identify the most common ones.

SE-AE Process

The exchange of relevant information between the Sales Engineering and Application Engineering offices has been automatized. In particular, the system has been modified to feed in automatically necessary information during the phase of generation of new engineering requests.

Company C

Task Manager A task management system has been designed in order to guarantee a permanent solution of the engineering related issues.

Sharing Platform

A repository for sharing new engineering solutions between different engineering locations has been designed.

Conclusions

The challenge for ETO companies is still the tradeoff between customization and operational efficiency. In order to counterbalance the tradeoff, we present results in terms of best practices to achieve efficiency in the ETO process, which have been explored in the research project with three industrial partners. As a know-how transferring process, it represents for companies a long-term key strategy that aims to reduce the degrees of uncertainty in ETO environment. Thus, through the adoption of the right tools, the companies aimed to extend the predefined solution space by integrating order specific solutions, making them reusable for future projects, and eventually increasing standardization. Additionally, those practices turn out to reduce the degrees of uncertainty and complexity in an ETO environment that is by definition, subject of constant changes. Each company involved in the project has focused their efforts on the solutions that better fit their products, markets and organizational structures. Company A had to bring to light hidden processes and knowledge that were embedded to the individuals and are spread in the dispersed repositories. The ETO process of company B is taking place in different countries. Consequently, the main improvements of Company B were in light of standardizing the communications and sharing processes. For company C, whose engineering business function is spanning in three different locations, the focus was on facilitating the communication process between the locations, establishing a framework to standardize the outputs, and to share the locally discovered solutions.

Depending on the degrees of similarity with the three project companies that have successfully implemented the practices, other ETO companies are likely to duplicate the practiced tools to achieve higher performances in terms of uncertainty and complexity reduction. This study opens up new avenues for exploring a proper taxonomy of the ETO environment in order to effectively bring companies' characteristics and the best practices together.

Acknowledgments. This work is funded by the research project through the Swiss Commission for Technology and Innovation CTI (CTI no.: 15021.1 PFES-ES). The authors would like to thank all participating organizations for sharing their insights in the ETO industry.


Riitta Smeds
email: riitta.smeds@aalto.fi

Rita Lavikka
email: rita.lavikka@aalto.fi

Miia Jaatinen
email: miia.jaatinen@aalto.fi

Antero Hirvensalo
email: antero.hirvensalo@aalto.fi

Interventions for the Co-creation of Inter-organizational Business Process Change

Keywords: Intervention, coordination, co-creation, process, change, business ecosystems

This paper increases scientific knowledge about developmental interventions in inter-organizational processes by applying coordination theory. The interventions interfere intentionally with the process they aim to develop, reveal interdependencies between the participants, and coordinate their interaction for knowledge creation. The three elements of the developmental intervention are:

(1) the participants from the different organizations, (2) the boundary objects that represent the inter-organizational business process, (3) the external facilitator, responsible for designing the other two elements, and for establishing among the participants the knowledge-creating conversational interaction mediated by boundary objects. In a successful intervention, the facilitator and the participants co-develop the necessary coordination mechanisms to support the knowledge cocreation of the participants from the different companies towards the common goal, i.e. the shared knowledge about the inter-organizational process.

Introduction

The current digitalization of industry drives companies to develop their inter-organizational networks and create new networks for business innovation. The increasing amount of information content as part of products and services opens new business possibilities for companies to serve their customers and end users in novel ways as part of a larger service offering network. This means a huge innovation potential in networked business processes and models [START_REF] Porter | How smart, connected products are transforming competition[END_REF]. Creating new ICT-enabled business ecosystems is a growing necessity for the survival of many companies nowadays. Also innovations develop more and more in collaboration between organizations. Collaboration in networks enables individual companies to create solutions to complex problems they cannot solve on their own [START_REF] Hardy | Discourse and collaboration: The role of conversations and collective identity[END_REF]. Collaboration is required also because networked innovation requires significant adjustments in other parts of the business system than the individual companies are embedded in [START_REF] De Laat | Systemic innovation and the problems of going virtual: The case of the digital video disc[END_REF]. However, the creation of networked innovation is challenging because networks are hybrid forms of organizing, and their structures emerge in competitive settings of specific industries [START_REF] Kogut | The network as knowledge: Generative rules and the emergence of structure[END_REF], and more and more also crossing over the borders of traditional industries [START_REF] Porter | How smart, connected products are transforming competition[END_REF]. Thus, no company alone can be responsible for managing the network towards innovation.

This paper argues that networked innovation can be supported by developmental interventions. Specifically, an intervention can coordinate the collaborative action between companies to enable knowledge creation across company boundaries. The intervention involves purposeful action by an 'external' agent to create change [START_REF] Midgley | Systems thinking, complexity and the philosophy of science[END_REF]. In this study, the intervention takes place in a network of companies and the agent acting and executing the intervention is a group of researchers external to the companies.

The concept of developmental intervention originates from organizational development [START_REF] Van De Ven | Explaining development and change in organizations[END_REF] and participative action research [START_REF] Argyris | Participatory action research and action science compared[END_REF], where interventions are seen as learning and action processes, consisting of the phases of planning, action, and results [START_REF] French | Organization Development: Behavioral Science Interventions for Organization Improvement[END_REF]. The intervention aims at improving the functioning of the participating organizations. The theoretical understanding of interventions is however limited due to the fact that most work on intervention methods and strategies is instrumental in nature, and is decoupled from mainstream organization science [START_REF] Romme | Organizational development interventions: An artifaction perspective[END_REF].

This paper aims at increasing scientific knowledge about interventions for inter-organizational process development by theorizing interventions through the lens of organizational coordination. Interventions interfere intentionally with the organizational process they aim to develop, by revealing the interdependencies between the participants, and coordinating their interaction for knowledge creation and innovation. The question becomes, how to coordinate these interactions over the whole intervention process, so that new inter-organizational knowledge is created, i.e. the intervention succeeds?

When asking this question about the coordination of interaction for inter-organizational process development, we have to bear in mind that the object of the intervention is the inter-organizational process, with a new basis for the differentiation and coordination of tasks [START_REF] Romme | Organizational development interventions: An artifaction perspective[END_REF]. Thus, the knowledge created via the intervention concerns centrally the coordination of the emerging inter-organizational process.

We discuss a preliminary empirical study of an inter-organizational business process development intervention to support the applicability of coordination theory in theoretically describing developmental interventions.

Theoretical Viewpoints

In a facilitated intervention that aims to develop an inter-organizational process, the facilitator brings together the participants that co-create knowledge about their interdependencies and ways of collaboration. The successful creation of new inter-organizational practices (process innovation) requires that the participants have the necessary expertise and capabilities to produce innovative solutions. Thus, it is important to engage all relevant stakeholders to the co-creation process [START_REF] Smeds | Bottom-up or top-down? Evolutionary change management in NPD processes[END_REF]. Together they form a shared space, "ba" [START_REF] Nonaka | The concept of "Ba": Building a foundation for knowledge creation[END_REF], a virtual community of practice [START_REF] Smeds | Bottom-up or top-down? Evolutionary change management in NPD processes[END_REF][START_REF] Wenger | Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity[END_REF] or an innovative knowledge community [START_REF] Paavola | Models of innovative knowledge communities and three metaphors of learning[END_REF] for knowledge co-creation. The interactive knowledge creation includes mediating artefacts, often called boundary objects that visualize the object that the participants co-develop. The boundary objects reveal gaps in current understanding [START_REF] Knorr-Cetina | Objectual practice[END_REF], and help he participants to cross their knowledge boundaries and create of common understanding [START_REF] Carlile | Transferring, translating, and transforming: An integrative framework for managing knowledge across boundaries[END_REF]. The representational objects are particularly useful in developing collaborative work processes [START_REF] Miettinen | Epistemic objects, artefacts and organizational change[END_REF]. They help participants to create a holistic understanding of the collaboration process [START_REF] Smeds | Bottom-up or top-down? Evolutionary change management in NPD processes[END_REF], to co-orient towards common objectives, and organize collaborative activities [START_REF] Vásquez | Spacing practices: The communicative configuration of organizing through space-times[END_REF]. In addition, these kinds of objects can be collaboratively modified to improve current practices [START_REF] Paavola | Models of innovative knowledge communities and three metaphors of learning[END_REF]. The possibility to collaboratively modify the boundary objects is essential for knowledge co-creation.

During the co-creation process, the collaborative sharing and creation of knowledge requires conversational interaction between participants. The participants bring in the discussion new observations concerning collaboration, reflect these observations against the current practices, and can produce jointly accepted conceptual change that constitute new knowledge [START_REF] Tsoukas | A dialogical approach to the creation of new knowledge in organizations[END_REF]. After this, new ideas produced can be ascribed into boundary objects [START_REF] Ricoeur | Hermeneutics and the human sciences: Essays on language, action and interpretation[END_REF] that represent the process to be developed. The dialectic between conversations and boundary objects produce legitimate representations of the collaboration that gain authority in the relationship, and help coordinate collaboration [START_REF] Koschmann | The communicative constitution of collective identity in interorganizational collaboration[END_REF][START_REF] Kuhn | A communicative theory of the firm: Developing an alternative perspective on intra-organizational power and stakeholder relationships[END_REF]. The dialectic, collaborative creation of knowledge via modifying the boundary object can be called trialogical learning [START_REF] Paavola | The knowledge creation metaphor -An emergent epistemological approach to learning[END_REF][START_REF] Smeds | Co-designing value networks in process simulations[END_REF].

Coordination can be defined as the management of interdependences [START_REF] Lawrence | Differentiation and integration in complex organizations[END_REF]. The need for coordination stems from the need to integrate the interdependencies between differentiated tasks. Successful coordination ensures that the differentiated tasks contribute towards a common goal. The task interdependencies, in increasing order of task uncertainty, are pooled, sequential, and reciprocal, and the corresponding coordination mechanisms are standards and rules, planning, and mutual adjustment [START_REF] Thompson | Organizations in Action[END_REF][START_REF] Mintzberg | The Structuring of Organizations -A Synthesis of the Research[END_REF]. The coordination mechanisms are additive; thus, with increasing task uncertainty, all previous coordination mechanisms are often used, and new ones added.

As environmental uncertainty, level of task interdependence, and time constraints increase, task coordination is not enough but relational coordination is also needed [START_REF] Gittell | Impact of relational coordination on job satisfaction and quality outcomes: a study of nursing homes[END_REF]. Relational coordination refers to coordinating work through relationships of shared goals, shared knowledge, and mutual respect. These relational ties reinforce and can be reinforced by communication which is frequent, timely, accurate, and oriented at problem-solving. [START_REF] Gittell | New Directions for Relational Coordination Theory[END_REF] 3

Empirical Developmental Intervention Project

We conducted a developmental intervention project to support the co-creation of a networked process innovation. We applied a participative action research approach where the participants took part in the research process [START_REF] Argyris | Participatory action research and action science compared[END_REF]. Action research applies action and reflection, theory and practice, to enable the creation of practical knowledge for the participants of the process [START_REF] Reason | Introduction[END_REF].

The intervention took place in a network of companies, and the facilitator executing the intervention was a group of researchers. Following the participative approach, the employees of the companies were involved as participants in the intervention. The developmental intervention consisted of three activities: 1) mapping the inter-organizational activities, 2) guiding social interaction for promoting participation, and 3) using mediating artefacts for co-creating knowledge.

The intervention was part of a consortium project of the Finnish Strategic Center for Science, Technology and Innovation for the Built Environment. Eleven companies from architecture, engineering, and construction industry and two universities developed in the project new, more efficient and innovative inter-organizational project processes and business models, based on the successful use of digitally enabled Building Information Modeling (BIM).

The successful use of BIM in construction projects enables, even requires more intensive collaboration between companies across the traditional professional and sectoral borders. With the use of BIM, the division of work and the interdependencies between the organizations change, and new forms of digitally enabled construction project processes become possible. This necessitates that all parties in the network collaboratively develop new ways of working together. No company can alone be responsible for the process changes. Instead, development has to take place collaboratively and concurrently between the companies in the network.

The intervention was conducted between January and October 2012. The intervention consisted of three phases: 1) collaborative planning of the intervention, 2) a threeday co-creation workshop organized in a relaxing conference center surrounded by Finnish nature, and 3) the further development of ideas into concrete ways of working during a real construction project. In this paper, we will focus on the first two activities.

Collaborative Planning of the Intervention

In January 2012, a group of researchers and company representatives collaboratively planned a co-creation workshop that should develop a future BIM-based inter-organizational process for the design and development of infrastructure. Three planning workshops á 3 hours, and lots of collaborative spirit, were required to develop the plan for a co-creation workshop of three full days, where three parallel groups would approach the development of the BIM-enabled collaboration process, each from their own viewpoint: 1) value creation, 2) the beginning of the process, and 3) the ending of the process.

According to knowledge co-creation theories, the co-creation workshop participants would need a lot of facilitation, and boundary objects, to be able to co-create new practical knowledge about working together in a future BIM-enabled design and development process. During the planning phase, a first "prototype" model of the future BIMbased collaborative process was thus developed, to be used as a boundary object to help the participants share and co-create their practice-based knowledge.

The Co-creation Workshop

Six Aalto University researchers acted as facilitators during the three-day co-creation workshop. During the first workshop day, the participants had difficulties with getting started. In spite of all the preparatory planning, the participants used the whole day to understand what they should collaborate on during the workshop. It seemed that the participants had problems in trusting each other. However, in the facilitated conversation mediated by the pre-modelled BIM-based process, the participants were able to discuss difficult issues that they thought were hindering collaboration in the presentday construction industry. These issues concerned the companies' different business models and the 'traditional' ways of doing business. These hindrances could now be used as starting points for creating new ideas. The facilitators made sure that each participant could share her/his ideas and could contribute to the shared discussion.

The second day was more successful in terms of co-creating new knowledge. The participants started drawing new ideas on sticky notes that were put on white boards. At the end of the workshop day, the participants co-created an idea of an agile coworking method which would enable the participants to collaborative work with BIM. This idea turned out to be a successful process improvement which was later on tested in the design phase of a potential construction project [START_REF] Lavikka | Bringing the design team together: Coordinating interorganizational design work using an agile co-working method[END_REF].

During the third workshop day, the participants focused on more thoroughly understanding their new work interdependencies to further develop the idea of the agile coworking method. They wanted to understand when and how they should use the agile co-working method in their BIM-based collaboration process that had been developed for an earlier reference project. The facilitators helped the participants to reveal their work interdependencies in the collaborative BIM-based process, and used process models and other boundary objects to support the conversation. Table 1 presents the tasks of the facilitators during the planning and the three-day co-creation workshop.

Table 1. The participants, boundary objects, and tasks of the facilitators in the intervention.

The planning of the co-creation workshop

The three-day co-creation workshop

Participants

-5 voluntary participants from 5 companies -6 researchers from 2 universities -25 voluntary participants from 9 companies -13 researchers from 2 universities

Boundary objects

Process model and process specification documents enabled the planning the of cocreation workshop and provided a common object of development.

Process model, power point presentations, specification documents to discuss about common objects of development, and as platforms for creating new ideas.

The

Results and Discussion

In this paper, we have aimed to increase scientific knowledge about developmental interventions in inter-company business processes by theorizing interventions through the lens of organizational coordination. We have shown that interventions interfere intentionally with the inter-organizational business process they aim to develop, show the interdependencies between the participants, and coordinate their interaction for knowledge creation and innovation.

The paper finds three key elements of the developmental intervention that are crucial for the coordination of shared knowledge creation: (1) the participants from the collaborating organizations, (2) the boundary objects that represent the participants' interdependencies in the inter-organizational business process that is to be developed, and (3) the external facilitator of the intervention, responsible for establishing the conversational interaction of the participants, mediated by the artefacts, to support the creation of shared knowledge concerning the business process.

The intervention consists of a sequence of phases: planning, co-creation events, and implementation (Fig. 1), and the facilitators can plan the intervention to some extent in advance. The facilitators collect a lot of data from the participating organizations before the co-creation event, and design the co-creation event in collaboration with key representatives of the participating organizations. More precisely, the facilitators 1) set the goal for the intervention in collaboration with the key participants; 2) collect the data and select the participants using interviews and snowball sampling; 3) design the boundary objects in collaboration with the key participants; 4) prepare a 'manuscript' and schedule for the co-creation event.

Fig. 1. The phases of a developmental intervention and its three elements that are crucial for the coordination of shared knowledge creation.

In the co-creation event, the boundary objects, often visual maps or scenarios of the inter-organizational process to be developed, provide some "rules" that help the facilitator to guide the conversational knowledge co-creation, and the manuscript acts as a plan and schedule to steer the highly interactive conversational process.

The results of this case study confirm that the participants of the co-creative events, the boundary objects, and the facilitators are required to coordinate the co-creation of shared knowledge concerning the future inter-organizational process. However, the object of the development is highly uncertain: an emerging inter-organizational process. Therefore, not all participants are even known at the beginning of the intervention, not to speak of their interdependencies that will become the object of co-creation. Interaction and mutual adjustment between the facilitator and the collaborating organizations are therefore needed throughout the intervention project.

The paper suggests that in highly uncertain and complex inter-organizational business process transformation, such as in the BIM-enabled project process change, the facilitator and the participants can co-develop the coordination mechanisms to support the necessary knowledge co-creation of the different organizations towards the common goal, i.e. the shared knowledge about the future inter-organizational process. The important coordination characteristics of a successful developmental intervention include both task coordination and relational coordination. The intervention 1) helps to identify and co-develop novel task interdependences [START_REF] Thompson | Organizations in Action[END_REF][START_REF] Mintzberg | The Structuring of Organizations -A Synthesis of the Research[END_REF] and 2) the intervention helps to create common understanding about how to manage them [START_REF] Gittell | Impact of relational coordination on job satisfaction and quality outcomes: a study of nursing homes[END_REF].

-

  Idea collection for the co-creation event -Deciding on the facilitation techniques -Manuscript for the co-creation workshop -Detailed plans of the group assignments -Implementation of Online group work tool -Design of web-based survey for feedback -Keeping the schedule -Pre-planned material for the group work -Challenging the participants' views -Making sure that progress takes place -Suitable climate for knowledge creation -Writing down ideas -Ensure the free presentation of ideas


Barbara Resta

Paolo Gaiardelli

Stefano Dotti

Roberto Pinto
email: roberto.pinto@unibg.it

Towards a new model exploring the effect of the human factor in Lean Management

Keywords: Lean Management, Human factor, Lean practices, Individual Behaviour (IB), Employees' Affective Attitude (EAA), Operational performance

Although lean popularity is rapidly growing, its implementation is far from problem free and companies may experience difficulties sustaining long term success. In this paper, it is argued that the human behaviour, affected by the implementation of both hard (defined as technical and analytical tools) and soft lean practices (concerning people and relations), plays a key role in achieving long-term superior performance. Through a single case research, the relationships between lean practices implementation, human behaviour and operational performance are explored. From the analysis a new construct emerged, namely "Individual characteristics". As a result, an alternative research model for further statistical testing including individual behaviour as mediating variable and individual characteristics as moderating variable has been built.

Introduction

The philosophy and practices associated with lean production have been around for many years, and have been applied in a number of settings including both discreteand process manufacturing environments, product development and to some extent services and product-services [1]. While there are great deals of lean success stories, a number of real cases has failed in achieving superior performance by applying a lean approach. Operations management (OM) scholars discussed several causes of this lack of success, many of which are indicative of the problems that arise in the human element during a changeover to lean [2]. As demonstrated by Veech [START_REF] Veech | A person-centered approach to sustaining a lean environment-job design for self efficacy[END_REF], there is a fundamental difference between lean organizations and conventional organizations doing lean things: companies that fail in applying lean, fail in approaching and managing the human factor. It is not enough to just apply a lean principle or tool without a simultaneous strive for lean mind [START_REF] Liker | The Toyota Way: 14 management Principles from the World´s Greatest manufacturer[END_REF]. What is needed is a balanced whole system view that emphasizes improved performance through a focus on the persons delivering value to customers [START_REF] Bicheno | The new lean toolbox: towards fast, flexible flow. Production and Inventory Control[END_REF]. Thus, personal focus, involvement and motivation are imperative when applying lean principles: "Focus on the people and the results will follow. Focus on the results, and you'll have the same troubles as everyone elsepoor follow-up, lack of interest, no ownership of improvements, diminishing productivity" [START_REF] Mann | Creating a lean culture: tools to sustain lean conversions[END_REF].

In such a context, many studies have focused on the requirements of lean in terms of hard practices (defined as technical and analytical tools) but they paid less attention towards the human factor and the soft practices (concerning people and relations) that could support a lean journey [START_REF] Dahlgaard | Lean production, six sigma quality, TQM and company culture[END_REF] [START_REF] Bortolotti | Successful lean implementation: Organizational culture and soft lean practices[END_REF], and that can ensure positive results in both the long and the short term [START_REF] Hines | Learning to evolve: a review of contemporary lean thinking[END_REF] [START_REF] Matsui | An empirical analysis of just-in-time production in Japanese manufacturing companies[END_REF]. It is thus essential to monitor and "engineer" human performance in the same way as the performance of the production systems is engineered to achieve a superior performance through lean management [2].

This paper aims at contributing to fill this gap by exploring the effects of both soft and hard practice implementation on the human behaviour and the effects of human behaviour on operational performance, adopting a longitudinal perspective.

The paper is organised as follows. Section 2 presents the theoretical background of the study and the research conceptual framework. In Section 3, the research methodology will be described and the empirical study carried out in a manufacturing company will be presented. In Section 4, the research findings and implications are presented. Finally, the last section closes the paper with the most relevant conclusions and future research directions.

2

Theoretical background

Human behaviour

The human factor is a key element for the success of lean efforts as most of the reasons for lean failure can be linked directly or indirectly to the human element. Human behaviour has been formalised in '80s by introducing the Individual Behaviour (IB) concept, defined as the attitude and actions or deeds of an individual working in an organization [START_REF] Arnett | A choice-making ethic for organizational communication: The work of Ian I. Mitroff[END_REF]. IB is affected by three factors, namely job satisfaction, commitment, and job stress, that represent the main components of the Employees' Affective Attitude (EAA) construct [START_REF] Rodwell | The relationship among work-related perceptions, employee attitudes, and employee performance: the integral role of communications[END_REF]. In previous research, soft practices has been shown as effective tools for the change of working climate, working methods, and working experiences [START_REF] Farris | Critical success factors for human resource outcomes in Kaizen events: An empirical study[END_REF], able to influence EAA during a lean implementation [START_REF] Wiklund | Widening the Six Sigma concept: An approach to improve organizational learning[END_REF]. In particular, lean soft tools are argued to promote employee empowerment and group activity, which have a positive influence on job satisfaction and employees' loyalty [START_REF] Jun | TQM practice in maquiladora: Antecedents of employee satisfaction and loyalty[END_REF]. A the same time, lean hard practices promotes resource optimization, reduction in variability of process, and defect free product leading to the improvement in performance, quality of work, and reduction in job stress [START_REF] Shoaf | Improving performance and quality of working life: A model for organizational health assessment in emerging enterprises[END_REF]. Thus, the implementation of lean techniques in an organization can positively impact the three factors of EAA.

Lean practices

A systematic literature reviews reveals that different sets of soft practices have been put forward by different researchers. However, these practices can possibly be grouped into a finite number of generic categories, common in lean implementation in different organisations. The proposed categories are [START_REF] Kundu | Critical success factors for implementing lean practices in it support services[END_REF]: i) management leadership; ii) management support; iii) top management commitment; iv) organisational culture; v) communication; vi) training and skill building; vii) financial capability; and viii) measurement framework. Similarly, in accordance with Dennis [START_REF] Dennis | Lean Production simplified: A plain-language guide to the world's most powerful production system[END_REF], lean hard tools and techniques can be categorised into three main classes: stability and standardization, Just In Time (JIT) and Jidoka (quality). In general, the majority of empirical studies supports the overall positive direct impact of lean practices on firm's operational performance [START_REF] Moyano-Fuentes | Learning on lean: a review of thinking and research[END_REF], without considering the key role of individual behaviour in maintaining such superior performance in the long term.

Operational performance

When measuring the impact of lean practices, different authors have tried to connect and reflect the combined effect of these practices into one operational indicator [START_REF] Bayou | Measuring the Leanness of Manufacturing Systems -A Case Study of Ford Motor Company and General Motors[END_REF], now popularly known as "leanness". It include [START_REF] Belekoukias | The impact of lean methods and tools on the operational performance of manufacturing organisations[END_REF]: i) quality; ii) speed; iii) dependability; iv) flexibility; and v) cost.

The resulting research conceptual model is depicted in Figure 1.

Research Methodology

The paper is based on an exploratory case study conducted in company Alpha, a medium manufacturer of draft dispensing equipment for beer, wine, water and other soft drinks. The company, has recently expanded its production plants and has introduced a multi-year lean manufacturing project to continuously advance its production efficiency, drive out waste and increase the productivity of the whole supply chain. Based on the research conceptual model previously presented, a research protocol was designed and Alpha's management and operational employees were interviewed at two different times: before lean practice implementation and after 24 months from the beginning of lean practice implementation. A structured questionnaire consisting of four sections was adopted, to carry out the interviews.

─ General information about the respondent (years of experience in Alpha, age, gender, education, main activity, type of contract, participation to lean practice implementation); ─ Employees' Affective Attitude (EAA), addressed to operational workers, to assess their job satisfaction, commitment, and job stress on a 5-point Likert scale; ─ Lean practices implementation, addressed to company's management, measured using a Likert scale (1 -5) to understand the level of adoption of soft and hard practices; ─ Operational performance: addressed to company's management after lean practice implementation, to assess the performance improvement achieved after the implementation of lean practices.

Based on responses from 64 operational workers and 3 managers (representing the totality of Alpha's employees) at a single lean site, the authors explored the relationship between the degree of lean implementation (soft and hard practices) and workers' EAA, as well as the EAA effects on operational performance.

Results and Discussion

A short description of the main results is reported in the following.

Lean practices implementation

As summarised in Table 1, it emerges that the company has started to implement some hard practices, but it is still in a preliminary step of its lean transformation. In particular, Alpha's efforts have been mainly focused on developing techniques and methodologies that support process flow efficiency and effectiveness. Nevertheless, lean methodologies devoted to production quality improvement deserve further significant investments. Moreover, several soft practices have been applied to ease the success of lean implementation. In particular, as shown in Table 2, project goals and values have been set (Management Leadership), adequate resources and funding have been provided (Financial Capability) to create autonomy lean organisation, as well as to establish a system to properly plan, manage and measure process performances (Management Support and Measurement Framework) and to ensure those necessary mechanisms to enable a cultural change across the whole organisation (Organisational Culture). However, internal and external communication initiatives to convey consistent information about lean and to demonstrate visible top management commitment are still lagging behind.

Individual behaviour

The analysis of the 64 received responses that compose the total sample -whose main features are summarized in Table 3-underlines that the application of lean hard and soft practices have a positive impact on workers individual behaviour. Indeed, while both the satisfaction and the commitment increase, the level of stress remains nearly unchanged (Table 4). Moreover, the detailed analysis of the individual behaviour of each category characterising the sample suggests that:

─ The higher the age and the years of experience in the company of the respondents the lower their satisfaction and commitment about lean manufacturing, whilst a direct relationship with stress emerges. Results underline the existence of a direct relationship between lean and cultural change and that lean approach encounters major difficulties if implemented in organisations, where the capabilities that have been acquired over time may limit management engagement in adaptive change. ─ Different types of commitments emerge considering the educational level of respondents, their age, their work experience and the type of contracts. In particular, people with a primary school educational level subject to short term contracts present the highest level of commitment in doing activities. Young people with a very short experience, are characterised by a high level of commitment in taking operational decisions, while people with an high educational level declare having a very strong commitment in creating new solutions. Such results underline how lean manufacturing ease the cooperation at any level of the organisation, eliminate the cultural barriers, and stimulate vertical and horizontal information sharing. ─ Satisfaction and commitment are higher in those departments where specific lean projects have been developed. Moreover, people involved in training activities and lean projects declare a major satisfaction, commitment and brand loyalty. Conversely, those workers and employees that have not participated at any lean project appear dissatisfied and not happy about the company. This result underlines how a right internal communication could avoid internal dissatisfaction especially of those people who are not been involved in lean initiatives.

Operational performance

Looking at operational performances achieved through the application of lean initiative, interesting results emerge in terms of quality, time and costs (Table 5).

Research finding and hypotheses

Based on the results described above, a new construct emerged from the analysis, named "Individual characteristics" (Figure 2). How these relationships occur should be further analysed: Hypothesis 1 -There is a positive relationship between lean practice implementation and individual behaviour, with the moderating effect of individual characteristics; Hypothesis 2 -There is a positive relationship between individual behaviour and operational performance.

Conclusion

To achieve long-term benefits of a lean approach, a focus on individuals is an essential part. Empirical evidence from this study shows that the human behaviour, affected by the implementation of both hard (defined as technical and analytical tools) and soft lean practices (concerning people and relations), plays a key role in achieving longterm superior performance. Moreover, a new construct, named "Individual behaviour" and representing individuals' characteristics, emerged. As a result, two alternative research frameworks, for further statistical hypotheses testing, have been built. The research could also be further developed by measuring the operational performance dimension through quantitative key performance indicators (i.e., OEE, throughput time, WIP, etc.) and expanding the performance construct to other types of performance, in line with a triple bottom line approach (economic, environmental and social).

Fig. 1 .

 1 Fig. 1. The research conceptual model

Fig. 2 .

 2 Fig. 2. New research model: Individual behaviour as mediating variable and individual characteristics as moderating variable

Table 1 .

 1 Hard practices implementation

	Before	After

Table 2 .

 2 Soft practices implementation

	Before	After

Table 3 .

 3 Respondents' characteristics

	Gender	Male	75,00%
		Female	25,00%
	Age	< 35	13,06%
		between 35 and 45	55,69%
		> 45	31,25%
	Years of experience in Alpha	< 2	21,88%
		between 2 and 10	29,68%
		>10	48,44%
	Education	Primary School	35,94%
		High School	50,00%
		University	14,06%
	Main activity/Department	Production	55,93%
		Logistics	15,25%
		Other departments	28,82%
	Type of contract	Long term	81,25%
		Short term	18,75%
	Lean experience	Yes	14,06%
		No	85,94%

Table 4 .

 4 Individual behaviour measurement

		Before		After
		Average Std.dev/Average Average Std.dev/Average
	Satisfaction	2,78/5	0,47	3,27/5	0,40
	Commitment	2,93/5	0,51	3,29/5	0,37
	Stress	1,72/5	0,93	1,75/5	0,93

Table 5 .

 5 Operational performance measurement

		Average		Variation
	Quality (Defects)	-30%	Dependability	n.a.
	Speed (Lead Time)	-30%	Flexibility	n.a.
	Speed (Cycle Time)	-25%	Cost	-20%

  1]. Resta, B., Powell, D., Gaiardelli, P., Dotti, S.: Towards a framework for lean operations in product-oriented product service systems. CIRP J. Manuf. Sci. Technol., doi:10.1016/j.cirpj.2015.01.008 (2015). [2]. Sawhney, R., Chason, S.: Human behavior based exploratory model for successful implementation of lean enterprise in industry. Perform. Improv. Q. 18(2), 76-96 (2005).

		Lean practices	Individual	Operational
			behaviour	performance
		Indivisual
		caracteristics
	6	References

[


Vincent Blijleven
email: v.blijleven@nyenrode.nl

Afshin Mehrsai
email: a.mehrsai@nyenrode.nl

Decoding Relationships of Success Factors for Lean Information Technology Outsourcing

Keywords: critical success factors, lean, information technology outsourcing, simulation, system dynamics

Managing the continuous growth of modern-day IT developments and its transformation consequences in manufacturing and service organizations is arduous. It burdens organizations and supply chain management. For decades, supply chain managers have outsourced their non-specialized IT activities to third-parties. Competition compels organizations to look for ever more effective services from their suppliers. Solely outsourcing IT activities is no longer sufficient. Monitoring and optimization has become decisive. Lean, a successful philosophy to pursue continuous improvement, is extending its contributions from manufacturing and services to IT processes. This paper explores the success factors for the implementation of Lean in IT outsourcing relationships. It aids managers in designing a dashboard to optimize and monitor the implementation of Lean in IT outsourcing relationships. The causalrelationships among success factors in the context of a system, based on multiple case studies, is decoded through a causal-loop diagram and sensitivity analysis inspired by the system dynamics methodology.

Introduction

Contributions of recent information technology (IT) developments influence all organizational areas and challenge contemporary supply chain manage-ment (SCM) practices [START_REF] Bhakoo | Supply chain structures shaping portfolio of technologies: exploring the impact of integration through the dual arcs framework[END_REF]. Today, coordination and integration of supply chain activities strongly depend on the performance of modern contributions of IT throughout the value chain [START_REF] Mehrsai | Integration of supply networks for customization with modularity in cloud and make-to-upgrade strategy[END_REF]. Outsourcing IT value chain activities can be a driver of flexibility, agility and leanness of supply chains [START_REF] Mohammed | Creating flex-lean-agile value chain by outsourcing: An ism-based interventional roadmap[END_REF]. For this reason, for decades, managers have made the strategic decision to delegate their non-specialized operations, including IT activities to external professional suppliers, termed IT outsourcing [START_REF] Lacity | Information Systems Outsourcing; Myths, Metaphors, and Realities[END_REF]. Among those delegated activities are IT operations, support, development and maintenance. Although the practices of IT outsourcing have been thoroughly researched over the last two decades, many IT outsourcing clients remain dissatisfied [START_REF] Gorla | The impact of it outsourcing on information systems success[END_REF]. This is demonstrated by low satisfaction rates, a high number of backsourcing decisions, and vendor switching [START_REF] Whitten | Bringing it back: An analysis of the decision to backsource or switch vendors[END_REF]. The main problems clients experience are degradations of service over time, lacking vendor commitment, delayed deliveries or slow implementations [START_REF] Gorla | The impact of it outsourcing on information systems success[END_REF].

Solely outsourcing IT activities is no longer sufficient. Monitoring and optimization of outsourcing relationships has become decisive to succeed in the market [START_REF] Elitzur | Information systems outsourcing projects as a double moral hazard problem[END_REF]. In doing so, Lean, as a successful philosophy to pursue continuous improvement, is extending its contributions from manufacturing and services to IT processes. When speaking of Lean, we refer to [START_REF] Womack | Lean Thinking: Banish Waste and Create Wealth in Your Corporation, Revised and Updated[END_REF] [START_REF] Womack | Lean Thinking: Banish Waste and Create Wealth in Your Corporation, Revised and Updated[END_REF] who describe Lean as a five-step management philosophy that, in essence, allows (1) organizations to specify value, i.e., what the customer is willing to pay for, [START_REF] Bhakoo | Supply chain structures shaping portfolio of technologies: exploring the impact of integration through the dual arcs framework[END_REF] to identify all value-creating activities while eliminating those that do not, (3) to align these activities to achieve flow, (4) to let customers pull the value, and (5) to achieve and sustain perfection. This process is often termed Lean transformation [START_REF] Cil | An anp-based assessment model for lean enterprise transformation[END_REF]. From an IT outsourcing perspective, the focus of Lean lies on aiming to fulfill the desire of clients by suppliers. This is realized by precisely defining the needs of clients and optimizing value-adding activities through continuous improvement, while using the least amount of resources necessary. Reported motivations to implement Lean in IT outsourcing are shortening application maintenance times, achieving higher software release frequencies, stimulating co-innovation and learning, and reducing software development costs [START_REF] Blijleven | Motivations and critical success factors for lean it outsourcing[END_REF].

To realize successful continuous improvement in IT outsourcing relationships through Lean, managers should first know what factors matter in this context. Through multiple case studies conducted, critical success factors (CSFs) [START_REF] Rockart | Engaging top management in information technology[END_REF] have been identified that indicate the key areas managers should focus on, to successfully implement Lean in IT outsourcing relationships [START_REF] Blijleven | Motivations and critical success factors for lean it outsourcing[END_REF]. However, understanding how these factors directly and indirectly influence each other, including the overall outsourcing relationship, is not straightforward. In order to address this issue, system dynamics (SD) as a methodology is deemed suitable for decoding the intricate relationships among CSFs [START_REF] Akkermans | Vicious and virtuous cycles in erp implementation: a case study of interrelations between critical success factors[END_REF]. In this paper, the causalrelationships among identified CSFs is explored by utilizing a systems thinking approach and involves the creation of a causal-loop diagram (CLD) and performing subsequent simulations. The results of so-called sensitivity analysis simulation highlight the importance and influence of several CSFs and related factors on the overall IT outsourcing relationship performance.

The remainder of this paper continues with an overview of the identified CSFs in Section 2. Section 3 presents a description of the research approach, followed by Section 4 providing an elaboration upon the contribution of SD to decode the CSFs. Section 5 presents an analysis of the system model addressing several CSFs. Section 6 then concludes this paper by pointing out the contribution and limitation of this study, and provides directions for future research.

Critical Success Factors

According to Rockart (1979, p. 85) [START_REF] Rockart | Chief executives define their own data needs[END_REF], CSFs are "the limited number of areas in which results, if they are satisfactory, will ensure successful competitive performance for the organization". CFSs have a prominent place in Information Systems (IS) research and have been one of the earliest and most actively researched topics in the IS field [START_REF] Lu | Critical success factors of inter-organizational information systemsa case study of cisco and xiao tong in china[END_REF]. For instance, it has been formerly used to analyze the implementation of IT outsourcing practices [START_REF] Gottschalk | Critical success factors from it outsourcing theories: an empirical study[END_REF].

This paper explores the 16 CSFs and related factors derived from 36 interviews conducted during six case studies in different sectors by [START_REF] Blijleven | Motivations and critical success factors for lean it outsourcing[END_REF] for the implementation of Lean in IT outsourcing relationships (see Table 1 for an overview of the cases studied). This paper goes one step further by extending the identified success factors into a richer framework that describes their causal-interrelationships and decodes them accordingly. The 16 CSFs have been included in the CLD (see Figure 2). In order to see the whole picture of factors influencing the success of Lean implementation and their underlying relationships, however, other factors beside the CSFs that influence the success of Lean implementation in the IT outsourcing relationship, but did not fit the criteria to carry the label 'critical' [START_REF] Rockart | Engaging top management in information technology[END_REF], have also been included in the CLD. To distinguish between critical and non-critical factors, the CSFs have been printed in bold whereas non-critical factors are printed in plain text.

Research Method

An overview of all the consecutive research steps taken during this project, including their corresponding deliverables, is shown by means of a processdeliverable diagram (PDD) in Figure 1. PDDs use UML and consist of two different, yet connected parts [START_REF] Van De Weerd | Meta-modeling for situational analysis and design methods[END_REF]. On the lefthand side, the activities conducted during this research project are modeled. The deliverables as a result of these activities, connected with dashed lines, are modeled on the right-hand side of the diagram.

For the purpose of analyzing the 16 CSFs and related factors and to uncover the relationships among them, a CLD was created with a software application named Vensim PLE 1 . The CSFs were first added in Vensim as separate variables that form the basis of the CLD (see Figure 2). Afterwards, positive and negative relationships among these variables were identified and added to the diagram and reviewed by experts. Subsequently, based on the CLD, sensitivity analysis simulations could be designed and run to examine policies of managers.

Case studies

Write interview protocol

Contribution of System Dynamics

SD is a business process modeling methodology by making a use of systems thinking for getting a systematic perspective to complex interrelated problems with causalities [START_REF] Sterman | Business dynamics: systems thinking and modeling for a complex world[END_REF]. This methodology was depicted by Jay Forrester at MIT in the 1960s. Systems thinking provides a problem solving approach by considering each problem as a part of an inclusive system rather than reacting to an isolated section [START_REF] Sterman | Business dynamics: systems thinking and modeling for a complex world[END_REF]. In short, SD illustrates the causal relationships between the factors in the context of a system, i.e., direct and indirect relationships can be found by means of a CLD. Basically, interrelated causes and effects of elements in a system, representing mental models, lead to a positive or negative CLD; which aim at reinforcing or counteracting change in the system, respectively [START_REF] Sterman | Business dynamics: systems thinking and modeling for a complex world[END_REF].

The major contribution of SD and its associate software ("Vensim") to the current study is manifold. First, SD can be used to define a thorough graphical topology of complex causal relationships among factors in Lean IT outsourcing relationships between clients and suppliers. The initial privilege of configuring the CLD of a system is the detection of direct and indirect relationships between its elements, which are difficult to recognize in a tabular form. Second, by means of the CLD, the borders of the entire problem can be distinguished. This provides a systematic perspective with defined exogenous/indigenous elements of the case studied. Third, after modeling the CLD of factors, this can assist the interested parties with understanding negative and positive feedback loops by adding polarities, and reveals the nonlinear structure of the system. The modeling position of the factors, turned into variables now, according to their supportive, contributive, and principal roles, can be classified into auxiliary, flow, and stock, respectively. Fourth, the next step is setting up a simulation model that describes the behavior of the system in a given period of time. On this basis, Figure 2 has been developed from the case studies. The entire content of the CLD as shown in Figure 2 is too much to discuss. Instead, it is limited to a selection of these factors. In the next section, it can be seen that four variables play a central role in the diagram, being the success of Lean implementation, trust, culture of continuous improvement, and close cooperation to identify and eliminate waste.

Culture of continuous improvement

Size of the contract

Outsourcing strategy focusing on partner relationship

Complexity of coordination

Trust

Clearly transmitting and hearing the voice of the end-customer

Co-location

Internal Lean experience

Continuous improvem ent-oriented KPIs

Utilizing Lean tools / techniques

Routine communication about the goals of the relationship

Routine communication about potential improvements and incidents

Compatibility of organizational culture

Management leadership and support

Close cooperation to identify and eliminate waste

Joint and ongoing initiatives to establish a continuous improvement culture As it is seen in Base 1, Base 2 and Base 3, the role of AT in transformation is crucial. By increasing the delay in transformation, all other key factors get negatively influenced as well, as their growth curves level off (see Figure 4). Besides, by looking at Base 4, it can be observed that oscillation in meeting the exact customer need (VoC) leads to fluctuations in related direct and indirect factors. This phenomenon is not desired neither in supply chain management [START_REF] Gupta | Managing demand uncertainty in supply chain planning[END_REF] nor in any Lean initiative [START_REF] Salah | Implementation of lean six sigma (lss) in supply chain management (scm): an integrated management philosophy[END_REF]. This gives rise to either unsatisfied customers or excessive lag hampering the success of operations. The responsibility of Lean managers and leadership is to avoid such disruptions as much as possible [START_REF] Found | Understanding the lean voice of the customer[END_REF].

Team

Conclusion

In this paper, the emerging management challenge of dealing with the growing demand of IT in various business sectors is discussed. As aforementioned, today, IT is the backbone of any business to facilitate collaborating, networking, providing, and delivering products / services to customers. Therefore, outsourcing these operations, while optimizing the implementation of the processes, reduces a major burden on businesses. In doing so, recently, Lean management with its prominent methods and tools are combined with IT processes for the sake of optimization. 16 CSFs have been identified in prior literature based on case study research. To show how these CSFs affect a successful and efficient implementation of Lean IT outsourcing, the SD methodology is applied to decode the complex causalities between these factors and their effect on outsourcing success. The CLD defined the associations and unfolded the complex feedback loops among the elements in the management system. Moreover, a simulation model is developed to be used for policy experiments and sensitivity analysis, of which the results were presented. It could be seen that delay in any adjustment and transformation is crucial to the duration it takes to achieve success. Furthermore, the importance of VoC is illustrated by demonstrating its fluctuations in other CSFs. In summary, this study shed light upon the comprehension of the role of CSFs in the context of a management system, and elaborated upon the monitoring and tracking capability of managers in their IT outsourcing decisions. Nonetheless, development of an authentic SD simulation model depends on several aspects, including availability of historical data, configured reference modes, and of mathematical equations used in the model. SD models are therefore by themselves always subject to improvement and the same holds for the model in this paper. Future research will improve and adjust the equations and expand the CLD of CSFs to incorporate more details concerning outsourcing, IT, and Lean.

FormulateLISTFig. 1 .

 1 Fig. 1. Illustration of the research steps taken.

n

  IT Cluster\Paperitos\Decoding the Relationships among Success Factors of LIMP in ITOR\Vensim\V6 Lean Causa Tue Apr 21, 2015 7:26PM

Fig. 2 .

 2 Fig. 2. Causal-loop diagram showing the causal interrelationships among the identified success factors for Lean IT Outsourcing.

Fig. 4 .

 4 Fig. 4. Sensitivity analysis diagrams.

Table 1 .

 1 Overview of key characteristics of the cases studied.

	Client	Industry	Supplier	Content	Size Age
	Client A Insurance	Supplier E Development 100	2
	Client A Insurance	Supplier F Maintenance	50	4
	Client A Insurance	Supplier G Development 3	1.5
	Client B Telecoms	Supplier H Maintenance &	15	2.5
				Development
	Client C Government Supplier I	Development 5	1.5
	Client D Food	Supplier J Maintenance &	9	5
				Development

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Basically, three alternative scenarios, being Base 1, Base 2 and Base 3, are assumed to experiment with the performance of the model. In order to reflect the role of time lag (delay) in the dynamic behavior of the system, for each stock (control factor) an adjustment time (AT) is devised. Among them "Lean transformation AT" is chosen to vary (see the exemplary stock and flow diagram in Figure 3). Next, in Base 4 to check the importance of voice-of-customer (VoC), the variable "Rate of transmitting and hearing the voice of end customer" undertakes random numbers through the simulation horizon, following the normal distribution, see Table 2. These alternative scenarios result in the sensitivity analysis of the entire model.