Autor: André Ullrich

The need to sometimes respond very quickly to changes requires companies to have a high degree of flexibility and speed of reaction. Application system architectures, which usually consist of old and self-developed systems, often do not allow companies to meet these requirements. However, investment funds for new software are limited, so priorities must be set when it comes to replacing legacy systems. An adaptability analysis is an efficient analysis method for planning the renewal of the application system landscape. This article describes the procedure and results of an adaptability analysis, using the example of an internationally active automotive supplier.

Advanced analytics applications in smart manufacturing provide beneficiary effects such as predictive maintenance, energy optimized factories, and automized quality management of products. While the benefits and thus the sustainability effects are well investigated, the research field is characterized by many single applications with little conceptual synthesis. Therefore, this research aims to systematize the field and to identify specific sustainability themes in context of advance analytics applications. This chapter provides an overview of existing advanced analytics applications in smart manufacturing and clusters the addressed sustainability themes. Applying a systematic literature review, following the PRISMA statement, 65 different applications within four research perspective could be identified. Furthermore, ten different sustainability-related effects of the applications in smart manufacturing unfold. The content analysis resulted in 27 sustainability themes, which ...

Digitalization is changing manufacturing substantially. The design of user interfaces in the digitalized production environment is of utmost importance. In this article, potential combinations of approaches to human-machine interaction are shown and examples of applications are presented. Multimodal user interfaces offer a high degree of immersion. As a result, approaches of (among others) VR-, gesture- and speech-based types of interaction are compared with the dialogue principles and their suitability in practice as work and learning support for employees is presented.

Carbon footprints are a widely discussed topic impacting the individuals as well as companies. A company can be transparent in their actions, by publishing a carbon footprint. These footprints can be calculated for a single product or the whole company. However, there is a variety of different carbon footprint standards. The internationally most recognized ones are the publicly available specification 2050, Greenhouse Gas protocol (2011) and ISO 14067. This paper compares the standards and gives a recommendation for the application of product carbon footprints.

Innovation activity in the industrial environment is shifting towards product-service systems as a result of digitalisation. Small and medium-sized enterprises have so far focused their development activities strongly on product development. The switch to “smart” products and the coupling to services often requires personnel and financial resources that SMEs cannot provide. Crowdsourcing is one way of opening up the innovation process to external actors and realising cost and speed advantages. However, the integration of crowdsourcing elements faces several challenges. This article shows both the potentials and the barriers of crowdsourcing in the industrial environment.

The impact of digitization on the economy cannot be seen detached from the debate on sustainable development. Corporate Sustainability Management (CSM) offers particular potential for approaching sustainable development and Industry 4.0 from a company perspective. However, supporting digitized sustainability management in companies with information requires a consistent and seamless flow of information, which can be achieved with the help of methods of knowledge representation. Current challenges and approaches for the development of an open and conceptional CSM model are presented in this article.

Alongside to the enormous rise in Bitcoin value in 2017/2018, there was also a tremendous rise in required Hashpower and electricity to verify blocks of the Bitcoin-Chain. Deriving from this problem, this article investigates different consensus algorithms and their impact on sustainability. Furthermore this article proposes an extensive comparison of the most used Blockchain algorithms with a focus on their contribution to sustainability.

Recently, implementation procedures of automatic production, digitalization and Industrial Internet of Things technologies (IIoT) play an increasing role in industrial manufacturing processes. Subsequently, the competence requirements for employees change. These changes cannot be anticipated by traditional learning approaches. The following contribution faces this challenge and will show a new integrated learning factory approach which combines the application of new technologies with a flexible production environment. Thus establishing production surroundings that are familiar to the learner. The contribution demonstrates this approach using a quality control process in the context of logistics.