Mastering Software Robot Development Projects: Understanding the Association between System Attributes & Design Practices

Software robots tend to increasingly take over organizational processes. However, little is known about principles of developing as opposed to using robotic systems, such as RPA robots and chatbots. Therefore, based on a comparative case study, this paper elaborates how different types of robots, due to distinguishing system attributes, relate to different design practices that arise from varying challenges of transforming existing routines into robots

The Social Factory: Connecting People, Machines and Data in Manufacturing for Context-Aware Exception Escalation

Manufacturing environments are socio-technical systems \ where people have to interact with machines to achieve \ a common goal. The goal of the fourth industrial revolution is \ to improve their flexibility for mass customization and rapidly \ changing production conditions. As a contribution towards \ this goal, we introduce the Social Factory: a social network \ with a powerful analytics backend to improve the connection \ between the persons working in the production environment, \ the manufacturing machines, and the data that is created \ in the process. We represent machines, people and chatbots \ for information provisioning as abstract users in the social \ network. We enable natural language based communication between \ them and provide a rich knowledge base and automated \ problem solution suggestions. Access to complex production \ environments thus becomes intuitive, cooperation among users \ improves and problems are resolved more easily