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The application of digital work assistance systems is gaining practical relevance on the shopfloor. Experience shows that the use of a work assistance system orients itself on the individual capabilities of its user and the specific work requirements. This excludes standard solutions. To order the variety of assistive functions in an application context, the assistance systems are classified in the present article. It also discusses the design requirements and applications use from an ergonomic perspective, which places the working man and his individual capabilities, which vary during working life, at the center of consideration. The reader can better assess the potential benefits and application limits of digital work assistance systems in an operational context.

Requirements for efficiency in manufacturing processes are steadily increasing in global competition. Through digitization and data analytics, not only efficiency but also flexibility and quality are to be increased. Cyber-physical systems, which use smart sensors and communication with manufacturing systems to independently identify, document and control process steps, can help solve this problem. These can be attached to many types of tools and thus also capture manual work processes. This article shows how a smart object with communication and positioning functionality accompanies a product to be manufactured through the manufacturing process and how e.g. manual screwing processes are recorded and analyzed by smart sensors.

Digitalization changes industrial value-added processes as well as the expectations and requirements of customers, staff, suppliers and partners. For industrial companies, these changes bring risks and opportunities. They need to react and adapt their products and services to remain competitive and survive in the digital age. With service design and design thinking, companies can identify future-proof business areas to develop products and services that bring users added value. We will introduce you to the nature and effects of such design processes and outline the benefits for your company.

Industrial devices have virtual and physical components that interact with each other in a plethora of ways. We report on a system that enables operators to pose queries about physical, regulatory and functional relationships between components and visualizes responses as a holographic overlay, thereby enabling in-situ querying and rendering of information for “on-the-spot” decisions. Importantly, our approach is not only applicable to digitally integrated components but applies equally well to “simple” objects such as surfaces and workpieces, and the materials they are made of.

In process of digitalization the shop floor area, widespread potentials are given to design the form of the organizational process within. On the one hand a variety of opportunities between optimization and innovation are available as a score of the digitalization. On the other hand responsible managers have to create the most efficient form of organizational structure to support the transformation process itself. This article describes the necessity to evaluate the leading form of organizational structure related to efficient interaction of the commissioned implementing team. Based on published characteristics for evaluating the organizational structure which are relevant to design smart factories, a model with varying forms is visualized.

The targeted curing of glass fiber-reinforced plastics (GFRP) is important to ensure the advantageous material properties. The use of RFID for curing monitoring is a completely new approach. This paper presents an experiment in which an RFID transponder has been integrated into GFRP and the Received Signal Strength Indicator (RSSI) has been measured during the curing process. The result shows that the RSSI can be used as an indicator for curing GFRP. The advantages of RFID technology compared to conventional methods for cure monitoring are the wireless application as well as the benefit, which an integrated RFID transponder generates in the further product life.

Social media and the digitalisation of products allow a direct view into product and service use and customer experience. This Product Usage Information may be used systematically in product and service development. However, this requires its interoperability with relevant processes and IT systems. This paper presents an approach and its implementation as an IT platform which fulfils these prerequisites.

A complex process in sheet metal processing is multi stage deep drawing. Once set up, it can be considered as a black box. Usually, after the sheet metal has been processes the quality is assessed. In the research project Smart Press a system is developed, incorporating inline pictures of the processed sheet metal. Pictures of failures are related to the actual state of the machine. Neural Networks are used to model the highly complex relations between parameters and product attributes. Based on the assessed real time data, the process gets adjusted to suit the needs of each individual sheet.

The topic Internet of Things (IoT) is omnipresent and has already found its way into many living rooms under the term Smart Home [1]. Be it lamps, heaters or the television set - everything is interconnected and easy to control from anywhere. The corresponding counterpart in manufacturing is Industry 4.0, sometimes named the Industrial Internet of Things. Companies and research institutions are working intensively on the possibilities offered by the so-called fourth industrial revolution. The forward-looking positioning of the German economy in international competition requires that the development and distribution of concepts and solutions in the context of Industry 4.0 be actively shaped by the industry itself and thereby to play a pioneering role in innovation [2]. Due to the rapid pace of development, it is essential for German companies to identify, develop and adapt new methods and technologies at an early stage and to transform them into marketable solutions.

The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) radically changes value creation in the manufacturing industry. Dynamic environmental factors, technical complexity, and limited resources cause many companies to be left behind. As a principle borrowed from strategic planning, business ecosystems can provide new ways of interorganizational collaboration and thus dynamize efforts to internalize specific IIoT knowledge. Especially in an early phase of trend scouting and idea generation, ecosystems can be seen as a highly effective venturing concept.