During the networking meeting of the Institute of Management Sciences on 28.6.2023, the Diploma Thesis Award 2022 presentation for outstanding achievements in the field of Management Sciences (Industrial Management) took place.

This prize has been sponsored by the Association for the Promotion of Research and Education in Industrial Management since 2013 and is awarded annually.

In his diploma thesis, Manuel Berger dealt with "Challenges on the way from a linear economy to a circular economy for the Austrian manufacturing industry with a focus on the automotive industry". The thesis, which highlights the challenges of the transformation towards a circular economy for the manufacturing industry in Austria, was supervised by Univ. Prof. Dr. Sebastian Schlund (TUW). In 3 phases, first of all a systematic literature review is conducted where 485 barriers are identified. As a result of the subsequent expert interviews these barriers are clustered into 57 challenges which are afterwards prioritized in a survey. The evaluation of the results of 229 participants from the Austrian manufacturing industry shows that a lack of subsidies, the restructuring of supply chains and the ECO-design of products are particularly relevant challenges that companies must overcome.

The diploma thesis of Katrin Deisl, supervised by Univ.Ass.in Dr. Martina Hartner-Tiefenthaler (TUW), entitled "Blurred Boundaries between Work and Non-Work in Flexible Working Arrangements: How to Mentally Detach from Work in Non-Work Time."
The thesis deals with the well-being of employees and their mental demarcation between work and leisure in the face of increasing home-based work and flexible working hours. On the basis of qualitative interviews, both the employee perspective and support measures from the company perspective were investigated, which can counteract the blurring boundaries between work and leisure. As a result of the thesis, a lack of awareness of the importance of general and individual mental boundary management, as well as the important role of managers in the boundary-drawing process emerge.

The aim of thediploma thesis from Barna Gal "Study of application-oriented sequence optimization for remanufacturing production planning systems in the circular economy" was to develop an optimization procedure. Although remanufacturing production planning has attracted a lot of interest in research, few real industrial applications can be perceived. Due to these uncertainties, manufacturers are forced to use cost and energy intensive remanufactured parts. Therefore, in this work, a sequence optimization method is developed using a genetic algorithm, whereby the need for energy and cost intensive new parts can be minimized by 46.44%. The work was supervised by Univ. Prof. Dr. Sebastian Schlund (TUW).

The diploma thesis of Florian Lietz "Design and Implementation of an Integrated Data Pipeline for Combining Process- and Text-Mining towards Optimizing Human Learning in Business Processes" describes the developments in the areas of text and process mining, as well as the rapidly increasing amount of unstructured data, which led to a growing need for possibilities to analyze, categorize, and monetize them in the last decades. The goal of this work is to extract information about process flows from unstructured text documents. A model of a data pipeline was developed and a demonstrator was implemented in Python. Supervisor of the thesis was Priv.Doz. Dr. Fazel Ansari (TUW).

In the paper "Development of a life cycle and assessment model for the sustainable and cost-efficient implementation of additive manufacturing in the spare parts management of the Austrian rail vehicle sector" by Roland Segner, a spare parts life cycle model and a semi-automated AM potential assessment model (AM for Additive Manufacturing) for the identification of spare parts for additive manufacturing in the rail vehicle sector is developed using the design science research methodology. The introduction of the model as a software demonstrator at companies, in addition to the automated identification and standardized evaluation of relevant spare parts from a generated database, leads to the streamlining of the AM decision-making process at plants. In addition, the model makes it possible to quantify potential savings in the area of spare parts supply and subsequently to optimize spare parts logistics. The potential assessment model is implemented and evaluated in a case study at an Austrian rail vehicle operator as an R-application. The work was supervised by Prof. Dr. Sebastian Schlund (TUW).

Erstellt von Susanna Hammer, 21.08.2023