ANALYSIS OF THE INFORMATION FLOW AT ABB CORPORATE RESEARCH

Sammanfattning: ABB Corporation is a swedish-swiss international company, specializing in power and automation technologies. The company is a joint-venture between ASEA and Brown Bouveri, merging into one company in 1988. ABB has five business unit, where the products and services mainly comes from research and development work within the company. Each business unit performs R&D initiatives and investments within respective area of reach, in order to achieve competitive products and services. ABB Corporate Research is responsible for research and development within the company where R&D initiative takes place. During autumn 2013 ABB Corporate Research will launch an improvement study, which will be the basis for subsequent major project. Information is a key factor within ABB Corporate Research, where each stakeholder in a specific project has access for specific information. The question is, how accessible/searchable is the information, and also how user-friendly is the current information system within the unit.   The mission of the conducted study is to examine what the employees of ABB Corporate Research think about the existing information distribution system for technical reports and publications, also propose overview improvements within the particular area. Delimitation has been established to conduct the study within the department of Software Architecture & Usability (SARU) in Västerås, which is a part of Automation Technology (AT) department, in order to deliver on the required time frame.   Theories regarding Innovation management, Lean thinking, Change management, Information distribution, Integration of information system and Ishikawa was studied thoroughly within the project. A qualitative research methodology was used, based on performing interviews with key personnel within SARU. The interviews converted into key factors (findings), which resulted into correlations to all key factors. A root cause analysis (Ishikawa) was performed, in order to examine and visualize which challenges appear within the current information system.   The result from the conducted analysis and correlations indicates that: the database is not user-friendly enough, it is difficult to acquire correct information, information is not in detail level due to limitation of information, it is time consuming to search in the databases in order to acquire correct information, Usually rely on internal networking instead of searching into the information system, restricted internal security and person based information dependence.   With the help of theories within the project, in combination with the conducted results from the analysis and correlations, improvements have been proposed. Due to the time frame of the project, further analysis should be performed for respective improvement proposals. The improvement proposals could be a starting point for the upcoming project. The improvements proposals are:   RSS Feeds solution for usability efficiency Standardized Work Methodology Integrated Database Interface Internal Information Transparency   The authors recommend implementing all improvement proposals, in order to further achieve productivity and efficiency within the organization.