Autor: Christian Ramsauer

Since the financial crisis, industrial companies need to deal with an increase of uncertainty and volatility. Therefore, the concept of agile production is discussed strongly as solution concept to react on this situation. Product design and its influences on an agile production is one important lever to increase agility. This article tries to focus on that topic and presents a Design-for-Agility approach.

The volatile world urges companies to react more agile to fast changes. Monitoring is a major building block for corporate agility. A lack of understanding of causal interrelations between a multitude of volatility drivers demands a new monitoring approach. Big data is presented as an adequate tool and its agility support is discussed from a data and analytics point of view. Conclusively, guidelines for developing a monitoring system are discussed.

Increasing market volatility and uncertainty require manufacturing companies to adapt their operations model to a substantially changing environment. The orientation towards agility can be seen as a key to success in such a situation. To achieve agility for an organization it is necessary to address four distinct dimensions of agility. A company oriented towards lean production tries to optimize one variable at a time. However, to become agile it is required to address two variables simultaneously. This article outlines current challenges for industrial organizations and points out possible solutions.

The term Industry 4.0 has changed from a fashionable issue to a serious research and future-topic in industrial production. Research organisations work on sophisticated technologies and concepts to implement this fourth industrial revolution, research grants are provided generously and model factories get decorated. However, many companies still cannot understand the term industry 4.0 and the related consequences on their own business. Especially small and medium sized enterprises have not understood the benefits. For that reason the currently existing learning factory at the institute of industrial management and innovation research at Graz University of Technology is enlarged to an industry 4.0 learning factory. The concept behind is the object of this article.