Quantified Evaluations of IT-Tools

Sammanfattning: Scania CV is a premium truck, bus and engine manufacturer. At Scania there is a research and development department, in the thesis referred to as the R&D department, which delivers ITtool solutions for internal customers at Scania. After a new IT-tool has been implemented The R&D department want to be able to evaluate the benefits enabled by the IT-tool. Today the R&D department mainly identifies tangible benefits such as improved quality, saved time and saved money due to the use of a new IT-tool. The R&D department have expressed that they see room for improvement both in the phase of prioritizing between what IT-tool projects to start and in the evaluation of IT-tools. Scania often prioritize product development projects for external customers before IT-tool development projects for internal customers. The R&D department believes that the position of IT-tool projects for internal customer could be strengthen if a more comprehensive IT-tool evaluation could be implemented. This way a better case could be made to emphasize the importance of prioritizing new IT-tool projects for internal customers. The purpose of this master thesis is to create a tool to manage benefits and disbenefits of IT-tools by making the R&D department able to identify, categorize, rank and evaluate benefits and disbenefits enabled by IT-tools. The result of the thesis has been found through a literature study, multiple workshops, and semi structured interviews with employees linked to two different IT-tools A and –B together with validation in an improvement group linked to another IT-tool C. The result of the thesis is known as the IT-Tool Evaluator and consists of a list of benefit aspects with corresponding weights. Two surveys and a calculation template has been developed with the purpose to quantify how a new IT-tool fulfils these benefit aspects. One survey focus on the IT-tool user and one survey has a focus of a company perspective. The benefit aspects are visualised using radar diagrams, a score for each aspect is calculated and a total score for the IT-tool is generated. The difference in score in each of the 22 benefit aspects in the new IT-tool and the IT-tool that is being replaced decides if the new IT-tool brings a positive change (benefit) or negative change (disbenefit) in the given aspect.