Knowledge Strategies for Organization 4.0 – A Workforce Centric Approach

Part 1: The Operator 4.0: New Physical and Cognitive Evolutionary PathsInternational audienceThis paper aims at presenting an overview of how the manufacturing industry formulates business transformation and knowledge strategies, to find gaps in Industry 4.0 concepts’ impacts on the workforce. The results indicate that the industry is still focusing on the digital transformation era that was adopted at the end of the 20th century, and how to adopt computing technologies to work more efficiently in existing business processes. The approach of this article is to adopt a methodology of three areas; (a) Human resource processes, (b) Industry 4.0 pillars and (c) Process knowledge, where links between these three generate opportunities to address for further research

Utilizing Lean Thinking as a Means to Digital Transformation in Service Organizations

Part 6: The Future of Lean Thinking and PracticeInternational audienceDigital transformation (DT) is gaining interest and changing citizens’ expectations of service organizations’ ability to deliver high-value, real-time digital services. However, from an organizational perspective, DT entails a continuum of transitions that emphasize cultural, organizational, processual and relational changes. Over the past few decades, Lean thinking has been a dominant part of many organizational philosophies and proven to be an important enabler, to cater for the aforementioned changes. With its focus on reducing organizational complexity and increasing value for the end-user, it can support DT through its systematized utilization of methods and tools for improvement. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the use of Lean thinking to develop and enhance service processes and its contributing effect to enable DT in service organizations. Accordingly, a conceptual process for Lean digital transformation (LDT) is developed and discussed. In order to test the developed LDT process, action research was conducted in a sales and service organization in Norway, where an after-sales process was selected for current-state analysis. The conducted study resulted in the development and commercialization of a software system, which has been licensed and implemented by approximately 100 users within a year. The findings of this study reveal a great improvement and innovation potential in utilizing Lean thinking to enable and drive DT

Implementation challenges affecting the environmental improvement performance in pharmaceutical production: Results of a green kaizen pilot

This paper reports on working findings in an action research-based project, implementing a green kaizen pilot in a European pharmaceutical manufacturing company. The aim of the study is to investigate how continuous improvement initiatives with focus on environment originally developed for the automotive manufacturing industry could apply to the pharmaceutical industry. It also aspires to understand the enabling and hindering issues are for such implementation. There are considerable similarities of implementing lean in general in the two sectors, however, some key differences and challenges were apparent when implementing this specific green kaizen method called Green Performance Map. An implication for pharma practitioners implementing the green kaizen method concerns how to improve working procedures and production equipment to become more environmentally friendly amid high regulatory demands on process quality. Implementation challenges are discussed in terms of fidelity, locus and extensiveness of lean practices implementation

Towards Digital Lean Cyber-Physical Production Systems: Industry 4.0 Technologies as Enablers of Leaner Production

Part 6: Industry 4.0 - Smart FactoryInternational audienceLean production emerged as an alternative way of organizing and managing manufacturing operations in the 1990s, following the close examination and promotion of the Toyota Production System as a better way of working. More recently, the advent of Industry 4.0 and its associated Cyber-Physical Production Systems has materialised novel ways of optimizing production operations. Though it is generally agreed that manufacturers should not neglect one of the aforementioned approaches in favour of the other, there remains uncertainty as to how Industry 4.0 technologies should be integrated with existing lean production programmes. This paper presents an overview of both approaches, and provides an exploratory study that examines the integration of Lean and Industry 4.0 in practice