Autor: Christian Lerch

Digital platforms have meanwhile also established among product manufacturers. Besides virtual marketplaces, platforms that aim to digitally connect production processes and thus focus on Industry 4.0 are also of particular interest. In the context of the emerging platformization of industry, product manufacturers are faced with the question of what perspectives exist in the platform business and how new potentials of digital value creation can be exploited. The article shows which platform-based business models are currently being discussed for product manufacturers and which perspectives exist for manufacturers turning into providers of platform-based business models.

Against the backdrop of industrial transformation, medium-sized supplier firms can use digital technologies to optimize their work processes. New digital production systems offer one opportunity for organizing factory processes more efficiently. However, their introduction requires a “corporate culture 4.0” that is characterized by trust in decisions concerning the future design of such systems, despite the involved high uncertainties. Using the example of a digital tool management system, this article presents measures for strengthening such a corporate culture.

Shorter product life cycles and rising demands for product variants increasingly lead to capacity demand fluctuations and result in unsatisfactory degrees of assembly system capacity utilization. By offering additional assembly capacities to their customers, manufacturers of assembly systems can establish a promising new business model. If the assembly system manufacturer takes over the responsibility for operating assembly systems, it has to be decided which HR option, recruiting own employees or leasing personnel from a temporary employment agency is best suited for this new business model. In this article a System Dynamics model is introduced that can be used for the assessment of such alternative HR concepts.