Paperstack - A novel lean-interactive system for documentation sharing in maritime industries

This paper defines a new domain for collaborative systems and technologies research: inter-organizational lean-interactive systems engineering. It departs from the problems pertaining to large-scale, technically demanding one-off construction projects, such as in our case studies, the building of specialized offshore service vessels. The requirements are unique, as are the explicit ambitions to be “lean”, in other words, avoid waste and re-engineering by making sure that the process is customer-driven and rational. Emphasis is on efficiency rather than effectiveness. This set-up poses new demands to the collaborative systems and technologies, which we in this paper have addressed with the design of a new type of Documentation-emtric ERP, which we have called “Paperstack”. The ambition is to support inter-organizational lean-interactive systems engineering in an integrated platform, and the next step for our research, naturally, is to put the systems into factual use. This paper summarizes the design ideas.