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Huge amounts of information are stored in the memory of every employee. How a product works, best practices in departments, customer-specific information, general market and competitive knowledge, etc. This expertise is a blind spot in most companies. So how do you make in-house know-how available? And in a time when many employees work remotely, in home offices, even across countries or continents?

Manufacturing companies are currently facing many hurdles. It is becoming increasingly difficult for them to find qualified workers, so-called blue collar workers. Technology adoption and system usability also pose challenges in the industry, as digital time tracking and shift scheduling are far from the norm in the industrial sector. Human resources software should facilitate the daily tasks of departments in order to achieve business goals. The use of such technologies saves valuable time as processes are automated. The needs of employees are put in the foreground to improve both resource planning and communication of manufacturing companies.

As early as 1997, Christian Lindner, now Germany's Minister of Finance, knew that crises and problems are "also just thorny opportunities. What at the time seemed more like a rhetorical, flowery battle cry from a brash young entrepreneur is, in essence, still a resilient, psychological fact today. Shocking strokes of fate or other drastic experiences often literally pull the rug out from under people - and change their perspective on their own lives. However, this forced change of perspective can also be a real opportunity for change for the better, if one has learned to deal with crises and to recognize and seize the opportunities hidden in them.

3D printing has established itself as a production process and has also found its way into the fashion industry. Individualised shoes can be 3D printed, but this poses significant challenges for automated quality control, as defects are rare. Autoencoders enable to train a system with defect-free data so that detected deviations from this state can be evaluated as defects. Our research shows a ROC AUC score of 0.87, proving that this method is suitable for anomaly detection in 3D-printed shoes.

This article aims to develop a model for the acceptance of RPA technologies based on the presentation of the state-of-the-art. The model is the basis of an empirical study on the acceptance of robot-assisted process automation (RPA) at a global technology company. The results of this study are presented in a corresponding publication "An Empirical Analysis of Technology Acceptance of Robotic Process Automation (RPA) (Part 2)".

To show SMEs a way to identify changes at an early stage, the interactive situation awareness monitor developed by Fraunhofer IPK is used. This gives companies an individually structured overview about their environment and their company (e. g. order situation). The area of the corporate environment is currently being expanded to include the compa- ny-specific component of automatic recognition of context-related data in order to provide relevant information to a company automatically. For this purpose, a machine learning model is developed and trained using company-specific data sets. First- ly, it is necessary to create the data sets with relevant and irrelevant environment information. For that, the PESTEL analysis is applied in this paper. Further- more, advantages and disadvantages of the analy- sis for generating data sets are discussed.

An essential component of digital value creation is the innovation of digitally networked business models. By networking different actors and service bundles, new customer value can be created. However, this networking leads to increased complexity, which makes it difficult for tradition- al industrial companies in particular to exploit these opportunities in a meaningful way. For this reason, a system is presented that reduces com- plexity through modelling and makes it possible to compare the effort and benefits of business model ideas at an early stage.

Germany is the largest European trading partner of the People's Republic of China. The main exports are chemical products, machinery, motor vehicles and electrical engineering. However, German companies are finding it difficult to gain access to the Chinese B2C-market. E-commerce, which has been expanded in recent years, can enable German companies to enter the Chinese custom- er market. The article presents the situation of e-commerce in China and shows relevant support offers of the platform operators, which, however, can lead to economic dependency. For German companies, it seems advantageous to deal with the principles of success of Chinese e-commerce in order to implement them in their traditional markets.

A robust and resilient supply chain is a critical success factor for the competitiveness of manufacturing companies. However, today’s supply chain faces various challenges, such as higher complexities and increasing dynamics coming from megatrends (i. e. globalization and sustainability). The medium-sized drive technology industry, with its global supply chains and high customer requirements, is particularly affected by these challenges. Therefore, digitalization initiatives are crucial. This article analyzes current digitalization projects in the drive technology industry in order to identify relevant trends and fields of application. Synthesized from the industry's target picture for higher resilience/ flexibility, greater transparency and more sustainability along the supply chain, these provide guidance for medium-sized companies and their digitalization strategies. (Only in German)

The introduction of new Industry 4.0 technologies is changing job characteristics in many manual industrial sectors, especially in production and logistics, through automation and digitization. Depending on the extent and degree of maturity, these changes are perceived differently by employees and can have both positive and negative effects on job satisfaction and motivation. This article uses the example of workplaces in in-house logistics to highlight how their characteristics change as a result of the introduction of Industry 4.0 technologies. It also presents a process model that can serve as a decision-making aid for companies to consider important implications for the successful transformation process and to pursue the human-centric design of manual, technically supported workplaces.