Branche: Manufacturing

With the advent of digitalization, prevailing paradigms – such as product centricity, face-to-face collaboration and hierarchical structures – are giving way to the vision of data-driven business models, digital, collaborative ecosystems and an agile, holacratic way of working in flat hierarchies and self-managing teams. Collaboration is made possible through the use of software solutions. In addition to adapted management concepts, the digital space also requires a digital cultural understanding on part of the companies involved. Lean empowerment is a pioneering approach to collaboration based on cultural values. In expert workshops, ideas were developed to explore how these values can be lived in a digital culture and thus in terms of global digital collaboration. This article presents concrete solutions from which requirements for digital collaboration and for implementation within IT structures and software solutions in particular can be derived.

With the increasing availability of IoT devices and significantly greater incorporation of Internet-enabled technologies into manufacturing processes, the idea of improving factory control through the use of artificial intelligence (AI) is also coming to the fore. Using the example of high-variation series manufacturing, this article describes which steps need to be taken to improve factory control with AI.