Abstract The pressure to improve products, services, and processes to remain competitive in the global market has fueled demand for affordable, high-quality, customized products with excellent availability and customer service. Production Planning and Scheduling (PPS) considers a wide range of internal and external factors in its attempts to align production with market demand. Advanced Planning and Scheduling (APS) systems have emerged to support PPS but suffer from issues such as deterministic views and practical uncertainties. Expectations are high that Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) will support complex production planning tasks by analyzing operational data to generate optimal plans. However, there is currently little empirical research on production planning practices and what role AI might play. Our paper highlights current challenges in production planning practices and outlines design spaces for using AI and ML to support these practices. Based on an empirical study of three German small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in the metal processing industry, we uncover how AI might estimate processing time and rework probability and thus we outline current design spaces for AI in production planning.

Within practice-centred computing, working with people to understand and come up with solutions that can support them with their practices is core. This involves using a range of empirical and design methods for understanding the context, elaborating design implications, and devising and evaluating artefacts, both in terms of their usability and the appropriation opportunities that they can offer. When evaluating prototypes in small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) we, as researchers, have more than once over a long period of time seen that participants have little time to engage in systematic approaches to co-design. Our experience shows that very often users cannot take part in activities that take longer than two hours, despite their willingness to do so. This suggests that we are in urgent need of more flexible approaches. In this paper we propose the concept of blended workshops as an approach to work with SME workers for the design of digital technologies to support their practices. This approach entails both synchronous and asynchronous activities, focusing on the elaboration of both physical and digital artefacts, which evolves over a longer period of time towards useful socio-technical solutions which can be easily appropriated at the workplace. The asynchronous elements are designed to allow participants to investigate and reflect in their own time and can can be key for stronger and flexible user participation in practice-centred design.

Previous CSCW research has paid increasing attention to regional innovation systems providing the context for CSCW research and design. In this paper we provide insights into attempts to intervene in such a regional innovation system via practice-oriented activities. Our findings describe experiences of co-creating knowledge around digitization of SMEs on a regional level, beyond individual company contexts. We reflect on the benefits and challenges such an approach affords and highlight the importance of interpersonal relationships and similarities between practices in different contexts to enable intended but also initially unexpected knowledge spillovers. Our findings highlight how a praxeological approach to CSCW can be influential in regional development programs, and open this field to CSCW research and design. We draw out lessons for similar interventions and outline fruitful avenues for future research.

The coordination of maintenance work in manufacturing poses a crucial productivity factor in small and medium-sized companies (SMEs) but often seems to be rather neglected in practice as well as in much of the literature on maintenance. We shed light upon maintenance coordination work by presenting a design case study conducted in an SME over approximately two years. We took a participatory design-oriented approach, involving all roles on the shopfloor affected by maintenance work. In three major iterations during the pre-study, a release-ready prototype was developed and implemented by the users over the course of one year. The evaluation of the tool showed how a new and mostly unintended practice of information flow, error reporting, and prioritization emerged such that, for instance, foremen becoming a central node of communication, formal prioritization shifting away from higher management, and actual prioritization being done by maintainers. This paper contributes to the body of CSCW work on maintenance practice in SMEs by presenting detailed empirical findings on the coordination work of maintainers, as well as the evaluation of socio-technical interventions into maintenance practices.

Past and current research has shown that Knowledge and Expertise Sharing (KES) is central to the appropriation of enterprise software such as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems. ERP implementation projects in Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) are often driven by research and practice. However, they tend to focus on the 'go live' moment rather than on the subsequent, much longer post-implementation phase. This, we argue, results in decreased utilisation over time and an increased need for workarounds. In this paper, we draw on an empirical study within four organisations which exposes the limitations of KES in ERP implementation projects in SMEs, especially in regard to the preparation of key users. Our findings suggest that, despite key users' essential role in these projects, they are often chosen haphazardly and are ill-prepared. As a result, they cannot fulfil their role of facilitating KES with end users, who end up appropriating ERP systems mostly through 'learning by doing'. This stems directly from complex and largely unrecognised processes involving consultants, hotlines, management, key users and end users. In this paper, we introduce and discuss specific socio-technical, KES-oriented measures which can potentially lead to sustainable KES throughout the ERP life-cycle for longer-term success.

The increasing complexity of cyber-physical systems poses special challenges for users to be able to appropriate and apply such technologies within their practice. Classic tools to support appropriation have usually taken the form of written manuals or video tutorials. However, recent research regarding appropriation infrastructures and sociable technologies has suggested that appropriation support functionality can be integrated directly into software and cyber-physical systems. The problem confronting this kind of support is the adequate visualization of the information and the provision of user interfaces that could offer the necessary basis for appropriation. Based on the example of 3D printing, we examine how projection mapping-as an innovative form of visualization-can be used as a user interface for hardware-related appropriation support. Through reflections upon the design and evaluation of a projection-based 3D-printer system, we provide insights that extend the notion of appropriation support to encompass projection mapping and that can contribute to the future development of projection-based human-machine interfaces.