I4S+ content for subscribers only

Due to the increasing complexity of cross-company transportation, it becomes more and more difficult to ensure a correct inventory of loading tackles throughout the entire supply chain. The use of a state-of-the-art SaaS (software as a service) solution simplifies, standardize and automate inventory management to reduce administrative effort as well as resources of time and money.

Smart glasses are recognized as a promising technology for supporting operational processes in the logistics sector. In particular, the application of Pick-by-Vision is capable of increasing the efficiency, quality and ergonomics of manual order picking. But first industrial pilots reveal problems concerning the implementation as well. To provide an overview a comprehensive requirement analysis is conducted and the results are presented.

In the course of digitization, the complexity and instability of business networks are considerably increasing. This has also serious effects on intralogistics. Under VUCA conditions, intralogistic systems develop into open, decentralized and self-organization networks of information-processing units. They adapt to the dynamic changes of their environment, by increasing their inner and outer varieties in a preventive manner. Digital technologies are not in a position to adequately control non-deterministic logistic systems; this task is essentially left to the working man. In order to overcome the challenges, appropriate models and methods of preventive work design are developed in the PREVILOG project. The paper presents cybernetic basics and preventive work design principles.

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.

Companies often do not have a clear view of all steps along the value chain. Many different factors are involved from receipt of the goods through to the finished product and actual delivery. Accordingly, the companies themselves only have a limited influence on the supply chain, resulting for example from dependence on suppliers at various points. However, in this context there is a wide range of possibilities for improving different processes in the warehouse. It is only the material flow in production, which accounts for a large share of the daily processes in a factory, that a company ideally manages down to the last detail. To this end, companies often use software solutions to keep an overview and implement successful control of the large number of operations. Graphic interfaces give a precise depiction of the workflows within a warehouse, thus revealing possible starting points for the companies to take action.

Solid forming companies are always faced with the challenge of producing high-quality products that meet the strict requirements of the customers. The quality has to be reproducible despite fluctuations occurring along the value chain. In order to meet the requirements, solutions for an improved process stability and quality are needed. This paper presents a data-driven approach that aims to adapt quality fluctuations. Thus, process data is modeled in-memory in a multidimensional database. Based on the results of an online analytical processing, the process is controlled in real-time.

The Increasing digitization forces companies to deal with their opportunities and challenges. The study underlying this article identifies the economic potential of technological trends and provides an inventory of the current situation in Industry 4.0. To this end, a total of 106 industrial companies have made a self-assessment of their current maturity levels of various technologies in their company and their current and future economic significance. This results in valuable insights for companies in the manufacturing industry, so that they can better deal with the range of different approaches and concepts.

Due to shorter product life cycles, increasing product variants and shrinking lot sizes, manufacturing companies are expected to produce according to frequently modified product specifications. In order to enable this, the available manufacturing machines have to be checked whether they can cope with such changing requirements. A computer-readable skill description of a machine can be used for an automated matching of changing product requirements. Accordingly, this contribution presents a product-oriented description approach of manufacturing machine skills. The application of the concept is demonstrated by an example of a drilling station.

There are numerous analysis methods available to support engineers working on continuous improvement projects. Digital transformation facilitates to reduce the effort for data acquisition and processing. The Institute of Production Management and Technology and the medical company Dräger have jointly developed a web application for multi-method analysis. This article describes its data structure and technology.

Due to the high competition on the world market, companies look for unique characteristics for their products. One opportunity is to establish a closer relationship to the customer by giving him the possibility to make last-minute change requests. This approach provides a possibility to discuss such a request at a great distance via Augmented Reality. The objective is to evaluate its feasibility and its costs on short notice and in cooperation with the customer.