Autor: Axel Friedewald

The competitiveness of the German industry is depending on its capability to develop and build innovative and thereby better products than other companies. In the future the lead in technical competence of the employees will be the most differentiating factor from international competitors especially in complex production processes. For assessing the competencies of the employees regarding their significance for a company’s strategy as well as for deriving meaningful indicators competence profiles on the team level have to be developed. Starting from that the required competencies for maintaining and expanding the competitiveness can continuously be pursued in the “Kompetenz Monitor”.

The cooperative production of industrial goods and services in networks is a key success factor for a large number of companies. However, inter-organisational cooperation does not only lead to new opportunities in a competitive environment but additional risks can also arise. These risks have to be assessed and controlled by a systematic deployment of advanced risk management methods during all phases of a cooperation’s life cycle. Therefore, this article shows which approaches should be chosen and which constraints have to be considered.

The analysis of maintenance tasks in shipbuilding by using virtual reality (VR) technologies offers significant capabilities of minimizing the maintenance costs. In order to reach these capabilities, it is necessary to develop a data model to support the required variant construction in VR. Additionally the efficient integration of the VR software components into a typical IT environment has to be taken into account.