Mapping a digital-physical development process : Case study of a small company

Sammanfattning: The mining industry is an old industry with established traditions and ways of working. Even though digitalisation has been well established in many other industries, has the mining industry just started adopting it. Digitalisation has impacted the types of products created and creating complex products that consist of electronic components and software that collect and share data. These products influence the development and create a complex development process when combined. However, the digital and the physical development processes need to be considered the limiting factors of the other.  This thesis is exploring the field of digital-physical development through mapping the development at a small case company in the lead of the digital transformation of the industry. The map sets the foundation to examine how agile practices are adopted at the case company in the purpose of exploring the effects on the complex development. This is a qualitative study with semi-structured interviews as primary data, and literature within the research field of product development, process theory and agile adoption as a theoretical framework.  The resulting process map can be found in Chapter 4.2 The Development Process. The map is visualising the dependencies between the different functions by describing activities, input, output, information, and resources of each function. The maturity of the processes found was low due to the ad hoc nature of the development. The structure and artefacts are considered to be agile practices that affect the studied process the most. The size of the organisation, the individual drive and minimal documentation allows fast communication and problem solving between the functions. This was a study of a small company with a low maturity level in their development process, which made it difficult to make any assumption about the efficiency of their process. Since this is a single case study in a growing research field, can a generalisation not be considered. Though, the results of this study can be found valuable for the case company for developing their processes and general practices.