Data flows in business processes

Because of the nature of having both PDS and IoT sides in one company, the business processes of Haltian vary. In the PDS projects as well as in the development projects of new IoT devices there are often conceptual phases needed. If new customers are ordering small amounts of IoT sensors for test usage, a starter kit is manufactured in the own production in the Haltian premises. These are certain basic models of sensors that do not need configuration or conceptual phase. The bigger amounts are usually manufactured by a sub-contractor. However, often the customer wants to have some configurations to the sensors. Then a conceptual phase is needed and the entire order-supply process takes more time and labor. All the different types of product development and manufacturing need different kinds of procedures that vary in length as well as in complexity.

No ERP systems are used in Haltian. The flow of processes and responsibilities are not crystal clear in the company either. This was visible in the interviews, as employees from different departments sometimes spoke opposite things about same tasks. Interviewees told that “strategy and consistency are missing from doing”; one interviewee even called order-delivery process as “wild west process”. This means that there are lots of processes to be improved as well as responsibilities to be clarified. In the interviews, the employees were asked questions to find out which the inputs and outputs of data in their work are and to be able to form a bigger picture of the data flows. In this section, the current state of data flows in business processes are analyzed.

The business processes of Haltian start from the sales. The company has own sales teams for both PDS and IoT sides. After being in touch with a customer, the sales introduces the customer needs to a product manager or R&D side of the firm, which includes designers from HW and SW. Usually the customer needs are documented in a PowerPoint document which is sent by the customer straight to HW via email. The role of the product manager is to form a clear product specification which includes information about the product, for example what kind of a sensor is needed, and what is the size and the color. It is an important document for HW so they can provide the right designs. The

specification is a Word file that is shared in Teams to most important project managers. This stage of the product development can be seen as a conceptual phase, where R&D examines how the customer needs could be faced via technology and then provide the customer an estimation about the financial costs.

After a conceptual phase, a kick-off meeting is held with a product manager, project manager, sales representative and HW/SW designers needed in the project. The aim of the meeting is to get everyone on the same page about the soon-starting project. After this the project team will start developing the product. The stage of development is called a productization phase and preferably it would have the same employees involved that were originally in the conceptual phase. This is however not always possible due to a possible timespan between these two phases and therefore a carefully documented conceptual phase would be a necessity to guarantee flawless data flow between the phases.

During the productization phase, HW designers are creating 2D and 3D mechanical designs in SolidWorks (CAD) as well as printed circuit board with the relative components in Altium (E-CAD). Both mechanical and electronical BOMs are created based on these designs. Updating the BOMs later are found laborious because all the changing and checking work must be conducted manually.

Whereas HW designers get the customer needs from product specification, SW gets their information from task management program Jira. It is used to identify the tasks and requirements of customer orders in the IoT products. When the product gets to supply chain and manufacturing phase after productization, the last process phases on that side are definition, variant creation, manufacturing, testing and delivery. These tasks have their own designated employees that are responsible for conducting the phase. In addition to Jira, they get the needed information through meetings and emails. They do not have access to projects’ network drives. After the delivery, last phase of the whole supply chain process is invoicing that is composed from the work hours and purchasing bills of the project.

The summary of data flows in business processes is illustrated in the figure 7. It simplifies how the product data flows through three main business processes of Haltian and in which formats. It shows where the data is stored as well. It must be noted that this is the big picture and often the information may be stored in different locations, such as the personal computer of an individual designer. Therefore, in the current system of Haltian, one

cannot ever be sure if the information needed is truly in the locations assigned in this figure.

Figure 7. Data flows in business processes of Haltian.