Digitalization as Facilitator of Effective Information Sharing in Production Systems

This thesis aims to formulate strategic approaches to digital transformation, which manufacturing companies can apply to make themselves more effective in disseminating and presenting production-related information to shop-floor operators. Therefore, two approaches are proposed. One focuses on disseminating information in production systems; the other focuses on presenting information to shop-floor operators.First, assessing digital maturity can facilitate the effective dissemination of information in production systems and contribute towards a digital transformation to Industry 4.0. Maturity assessments provide an understanding of current capabilities. This enables the formulation of goals for digital transformations and, subsequently, facilitates the creation of development plans to make disseminating information more effective.Second, applying digital technologies can facilitate new capabilities for presenting information to operators and contribute towards a digital transformation to Operator 4.0. Operators work under varying circumstances, which requires varying types of information as cognitive support. Understanding these situational requirements facilitates the selection and subsequent implementation of suitable digital technologies for presenting information to operators more effectively.Together, these two approaches demonstrate how digitalization can facilitate effective information sharing in production systems and for shop-floor operators

Future competence at shopfloor in the era of Industry 4.0 - A case study in Norwegian industry

Industry 4.0 technologies with the vision of smart factories will dominate the manufacturing industry for the next decades. Hence, the application of digital technologies of modern IT and communication technologies to enable machines, products, and human being exchanging information with each other will be of high importance. Consequently, more complex manufacturing processes will evolve and affecting the interplay of humans and technology. Thus, we argue that the competence needed for the future will change to successfully integrate industry 4.0 technologies. From this perspective, sufficient and correct competence will be a critical success factor enabling to integrate and to apply required new digital technologies at shopfloor. Hence, both technical professionals and operators at shop floor will be involved. Case studies from six Norwegian industry companies are used to illustrate how future competence at shopfloor must fit into the era of industry 4.0. Our empirical evidence shows that both upskilling and reskilling is necessary to success with the digital transformation and a good starting point is the operators’ positive attitude to upskill their competence. How to manage this has to be included in a digital strategy. This article will provide an important contribution on how companies can solve the issues as evolution of competence for future success in the era of industry 4.0, which should be relevant to both industry and academia.publishedVersio

Value co-creation in the digital factory – The empowered role of shop floor workers

There is a gap in the Business Process Management (BPM) literature addressing human and organizational factors in BPM practice in organisations. This research in progress paper proposes to identify organisational cultural factors and assess their impact on BPM success in an organization. The paper explores the extant literature on organisational culture in a BPM context and BPM culture. Shien’s model is selected as the most comprehensive model of organisation culture and is extended to include the dimensions of BPM culture as proposed by Schmiedel, Vom Brocke and Recker. In the conclusion a proposed field study exploring the validation of the dimensions of BPM culture is outlined

Barriers Hindering an Efficient Implementation Process of Digital Technologies; a Case Study at Norwegian Manufacturing Companies

The existing wave of improvement in manufacturing industry is strongly driven by the application of digital technologies. Unfortunately, the implementation process is not straightforward. To understand the barriers which hinder a smooth implementation process is essential for successful implementation of digital technologies. Our study aims to identify the major barriers based on a case study performed at six Norwegian manufacturing companies, to know what to solve enabling a smoother implementation process. The findings shows that both technical and organizational aspects are of importance to consider, where the organizational aspects are seen as the most underestimated. The lack of digital competence alongside underestimated need for organizational development of involved people emerges as prominent barriers. Some technical problems were also pertinent, like system integration. Sharing of data was seen as a potential asset, but both legal, strategic and technical issues hampered this. The results of this study may help managers and practitioners to address the major barriers highlighted, paving the way for successful implementation and integration of digital technologies in the manufacturing industry.acceptedVersio

A proposal to introduce digitalization technologies within the automation learning process

Although the digital factory (DF) concept has raised high expectations since its inception, it is still missing industrial impact. One of the problems attributed to this issue is the lack of education curricula for enhancing the related digital competences of the future professionals. Higher education institutions, as major stakeholders in education, should introduce the new technologies for DF in practical courses. However, it is difficult to deal with the complexity of those technologies in a time-limited environment such us a bachelor or a master course. Instead of providing complete knowledge, this paper proposes to focus on the methodological aspects that allow students to acquire the skills needed to handle those technologies. Specifically, this paper illustrates this approach for teaching virtual commissioning (VC) within the automation learning process. The goal is to show the students how to use powerful industrial tools for performing VC through a set of methodological steps that help students manage the complexity of the VC process regardless of the specific tools used for it.This work was financed by Erasmus+, UE (grant number 2018-1-FR01-KA203-048175) and by GV/EJ (grant numbers IT1324-19 and KK-2019-00095

Maturity SCAN 4.0 - An analysis and discussion of results from the scanning of digital capabilities adopted in Argentinian CPG companies

Industry 4.0 is a new dynamic paradigm for manufacturing companies, being studied by academia and evolving at the same time as companies are trying to leverage its potentials. Readiness and maturity models have been developed to assess Industry 4.0 adoption, diagnose the current state of companies regarding digital transformation and help them understand how to move from the current situation to a desirable future one. However, these models are generic, based on general principles of Industry 4.0 and do not consider the particular challenges and potentials of each industry and company. In practice, the success of Industry 4.0 implementation depends on how companies manage to match the concepts and technologies with specific potentials in the context of their strategy. For this purpose, a study within companies of the same industrial sector is proposed. It serves as first step of "customization" of industry 4.0 concepts to help companies identify their specific benefits. The results of the study within 30 companies in the Consumer Packaged Goods sector in Argentina is presented. It combines the findings from surveys and self-assessments based on a proven maturity model with workshops and semi-structured interviews within a group of managers who are responsible for digital transformation, IT and Operations in their companies. In addition to an initial evaluation of the current Status quo, the analysis focusses on the main challenges and needs of the sector and possible actions to address them

The future of factories: Different trends

The technological advancements promote the rise of the fourth industrial revolution, where key terms are efficiency, innovation, and enterprises’ digitalization. Market globalization, product mass customization, and more complex products need to reflect on changing the actual design methods and developing business processes and methodologies that have to be data-driven, AI-assisted, smart, and service-oriented. Therefore, there is a great interest in experimenting with emerging technologies and evaluating how they impact the actual business processes. This paper reports a comparison among the major trends in the digitalization of a Factory of the Future, in conjunction with the two major strategic programs of Industry 4.0 and China 2025. We have focused on these two programs because we have had experience with them in the context of the FIRST H2020 project. European industrialists identify the radical change in the traditional manufacturing production process as the rise of Industry 4.0. Conversely, China mainland launched its strategic plan in China 2025 to promote smart manufacturing to digitalize traditional manufacturing processes. The main contribution of this review paper is to report about a study, conducted and part of the aforementioned FIRST project, which aimed to investigate major trends in applying for both programs in terms of technologies and their applications for the factory’s digitalization. In particular, our analysis consists of the comparison between Digital Factory, Virtual Factory, Smart Manufacturing, and Cloud Manufacturing. We analyzed their essential characteristics, the operational boundaries, the employed technologies, and the interoperability offered at each factory level for each paradigm. Based on this analysis, we report the building blocks in terms of essential technologies required to develop the next generation of a factory of the future, as well as some of the interoperability challenges at a different scale, for enabling inter-factories communications between heterogeneous entities