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Digitalization opens up new forms of operational training. A growing focus is on smart services, which allow for proactive engagement with customer demands and empower businesses in times of digitalization. While traditional learning environments are rarely tailored toward individual needs, smart services offer new opportunities. Decentralization, previously only a utopic vision, is becoming the reality now.

In remanufacturing, used goods are brought up to the quality level of a new product. This distinguishes it from recycling, which recovers materials and converts them into new units or products. Various uncertainties, such as the condition, quantity and time of return, can be minimized with Industry 4.0 approaches and artificial intelligence. A special learning concept ensures that employees have the required competence profiles in this context.

In the course of digitalization, collaboration between humans and machines is inevitable. This should be considered as early as possible in further training. There’s a major obstacle to this in mechanical engineering: the lack of access to the knowledge needed for success. This can have a negative impact on the acceptance of digitalized processes. A teaching and learning platform teaching digitalization on real machines does important work here.

Agile methods are extremely useful in solving complex problems. This is particularly beneficial in market environments where the routines of traditional corporate management are constantly being questioned. Agility is closely linked to the core ideas of Lean Management, as evidenced by the focus on processes and people. Lean factories facilitate a hands-on engagement with Lean principles, thereby promoting agile process management in various production contexts.

Digital transformation processes have a high tendency for delay, exceeding costs, and failure. This poses a significant risk in competitive global markets and shifting business models of entire industries. Successful companies have a different approach to new technologies than more traditional incumbents. Including the workforce in the transformation via change leadership in a digital transformation coaching process can reduce fear and resistance and can lead to a paradigm shift of approaching the digital transformation itself: as an agility driven, infinite game with high potential gain.

Establishing “smart” production processes that are focused on sustainability and based on aggregated data requires a great deal of exchange at various levels. The vertical integration of different production components provides companies with an important basis for achieving their sustainability goals. Digital twins can play a decisive role in driving this process forward.

The planning and implementation of automated warehouses is characterized by high investments and risks. The FMEA (Failure Mode and Effects Analysis) currently used to reduce risks requires a great deal of effort to conduct, as it has deficits in terms of design and implementation support. These deficits include a predominant focus on the process view without linking this to the design FMEA for automation objects, an insufficient structure for the use of similar repetitive processes and technologies, a lack of automated, parameterized generation of activities, failures and causes, and a lack of integrated test scenario derivation. These deficits lead to unrecognized failures and increase the effort required to carry out the FMEA and develop test scenarios. In this article, we present a generic FMEA model which, among other things, is able to access extensive practical data in the form of knowledge bases and thus resolve the aforementioned deficits.

Digital product passports are becoming increasingly mandatory for monitoring saving targets within the framework of EU-wide emission reductions. DPPs can enable a standardized exchange of emissions data along the entire product life cycle. A framework for systematic introduction and targeted use can simplify their often difficult practical integration, especially for small and medium-sized companies.

The crises of recent years have highlighted the importance of robust business processes. Even if the concept of robustness is often not clearly defined in the context of entrepreneurial activity, it can certainly be defined on the basis of various factors such as agility, adaptability and resilience. A systematic analysis of robustness and its prerequisites in the corporate context is therefore highly relevant, especially in times characterized by uncertainty.

Nowadays, maintenance logistics is considered an integral part of sustainable maintenance management and is now conducted with IT support in many of the fields where it is applied. It can therefore be seen as one of many examples of digitalization in the working world. Both the selected maintenance strategy, the implementation of which is more or less linked to the use of intelligent technologies, and the current level of IT integration are emblematic of the degree of digitalization in this context. In the agricultural sector, the type of maintenance objects in question plays an important role in the use of digital technologies. This article is dedicated to investigating the status quo of digital maintenance logistics in German agricultural businesses at the interface of ICT, technology and business.