In today’s highly dynamic and unpredictable project environment, companies need to be able to manage changes quickly and effectively, otherwise, the final product will not be current and will only go to waste. Traditional project management approaches that focus on planning are no longer efficient and companies are forced to adopt new ways of working. As a result, more flexible agile project management (APM) approaches have emerged over the last decades. Originally developed for the software industry, APM is now increasingly recognized and adopted also by other industry sectors. However, due to some discipline-specific differences, the adoption of APM by non-software companies is challenging and requires many adjustments and high financial input. While the larger organizations have sufficient resources to make such a transition, small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) generally cannot afford to do so, and therefore need alternative strategies to increase their agility and stay competitive on the global market. In this paper, we present a case study of a Slovenian medium-sized manufacturing company that implemented only certain APM practices separately and not as part of a structured APM methodology, and still managed to achieve significant benefits: improved communication, faster detection of discrepancies, more effective problem-solving and greater flexibility. The results also suggest that APM practices, even when implemented separately, positively impact project success in terms of both efficiency and stakeholder satisfaction, and can thus help in establishing an economically, socially, and environmentally more sustainable workplace.

Agile development became very popular at the beginning of the 21st century when the Manifesto for Agile Software Development was released. Since then, it has been predominant in the software industry and has been increasingly transferred to the development of physical products due to its great success. There are many studies on Agile-Stage-Gate hybrids that combine agile Scrum and the traditional Stage-Gate model, however no research has been found that addresses a direct integration of Scrum into a concurrent product development model in a similar way. In this paper, we therefore examine the possibility of introducing Scrum into the concurrent product development and propose a Scrum framework for an Agile-Concurrent hybrid. We propose that the framework for concurrent development remains unchanged: the stages overlap and the track-and-loop approach is preserved, while Scrum is proposed for the execution of day-to-day work. The main advantage of the proposed hybrid is that after each iteration the customer reviews the results of an entire loop, not just of one stage, which enables a broader understanding of the progress and facilitates a more extensive feedback. A quicker resolution of discrepancies, and a faster and more effective response to change is thus ensured. In the paper, the needed organizational changes and potential implementation issues are also discussed.

Today, three conditions are crucial for a company to be competitive on the market: quality, reduced time and low costs for the development of new products. The paper shows how companies developing new products (NPD) for the market can successfully implement concurrent engineering as an improvement of project management, in order to reduce product development time and costs and to ensure the quality expected by customers. The methodology presented in this paper is based on three main pillars of knowledge: project management, teamwork and concurrent engineering. The methodology provides a step-by-step guideline for the introduction of concurrent engineering in a company. This paper also presents the results of 10 Slovenian companies where this methodology has been tested on 20 pilot projects. The results show that managed projects upgraded with the principles of concurrent engineering lead to cost reduction, shorter development time and fewer discrepancies.

In order to survive in today’s highly competitive global market, small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) have had to transition from sequential to concurrent product development, which significantly shortens development cycles, reduces costs, and ensures high product quality. Despite its many benefits, concurrent product development is still based on detailed upfront planning and cannot address the challenges related to today’s ever-growing uncertainty, constantly changing environment, and unstable requirements. A potential solution to this problem could be in more flexible and value-driven agile project management (APM) approaches, typical of software development. In this paper, we propose a new product development model specifically appropriate for SMEs that combines concurrent product development principles with APM elements. It is designed as a loop of five repetitive steps (macroplan, microplan, iteration activities, review, and retrospective) that are being executed within individual concurrent development loops. The application of the model is presented on a real case example of process development and small batch manufacture of a complex wiring harness. The study reveals many benefits of the proposed model, such as improved communication, faster detection of discrepancies, more effective problem solving, and greater flexibility. A positive impact on project success is also observed.

This paper addresses the problem of establishing efficient intralogistic systems, focusing on the generation of roadmaps on a given layout and the coordination of multiple Automated Guided Vehicles (AGVs). A simulation-based approach for automatic roadmap design is proposed. An event-based simulator is developed that uses ant-colony inspired optimization to generate roadmaps tailored to the specific characteristics of a given intralogistic problem, i.e., the plant layout, fleet size, statistical description of tasks, dispatching algorithm, etc. The generated solutions are evaluated with a Multi-Agent Path Finding (MAPF) simulator that uses a Safe Interval Path Planning (SIPP) algorithm. By analysing the system throughput, the optimal fleet size for the system is proposed. The approach is validated through various examples and benchmarked against existing methods in the literature. Note to Practitioners —Creating efficient roadmaps plays a key role in improving the efficiency of multi-AGV systems. Usually, roadmaps are designed by experts, which is time consuming and may lead to suboptimal solutions due to the complexity of the problem. The main objective of this work is to develop a methodology that allows the automatic generation of efficient roadmaps taking into account the specific characteristics of an intralogistic problem. The main advantage is the fast generation of solutions and their validation in terms of throughput. At the same time, the presented methodology allows a quick correction of the solution if one of the problem characteristics changes, without the need to change the layout itself. This provides industry practitioners with an effective tool that facilitates their work in setting up multi-AGV systems, thus saving time and costs.

This paper outlines a risk management method that is based on the use of a standard risk management model and is adapted to the specific nature of infrastructure projects. The standard model can be used to identify and quantify unexpected events in planning and executing a project. The use of a risk map will also be illustrated. A risk map can serve to classify the identified and quantified risk events, depending on the expected loss, to critical risks that call for a more in-depth treatment, and non-critical risks that are normally not monitored, while no measures are foreseen in advance. A risk map is used to determine what the anticipated effects of the measures to mitigate the critical risks will be, and how the anticipated measures enable the transition from a critical risk to a non-critical risk. In this article, the suggested risk management is illustrated using the example of the erection of a reservoir for a hydroelectric power plant. The use of the proposed tools for the identification, assessment, prioritisation, and management of risks proved highly successful. With the use of the proposed risk model, the critical risk events were lowered under the acceptable level of the expected losses.