Open Access Articles

The assertion “Our people are what set us apart from our rivals” is a common statement made by nearly every company, highlighting the significance of their people as the most valuable asset. Similarly, a corporate culture emphasizing risk awareness and learning from experiences has played a key role in shaping supply chain resilience (SCRES) amidst competitive dynamics in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Employee engagement, communication, and collaboration, as dimensions of SC risk awareness, determine the effectiveness of firms’ cultures in handling large-scale disruptions with robustness and agility. Additionally, the COVID-19 crisis has had a positive impact on firms’ learning orientation. The crucial necessity of digital supply chain (SC) transformation to enhance SCRES under pandemic conditions has further reinforced the need for dynamic adaptation and reconfiguration of firms’ culture and employee skillsets through digital upskilling.

Small and medium-sized enterprises still face the challenge of shaping their digital transformation. Maturity models offer a way to capture the situation within a company and support the formation of an Industry 4.0 vision. This paper presents a methodology that companies can use to develop a roadmap for shaping digital transformation by enabling the transfer of this vision into concrete decision-making steps.

An increased awareness of risks and rising incidents prompt companies to enhance the resilience of their supply chains. While various measures can be employed to increase resilience, a parallel consideration of a multitude of metrics is necessary to explicitly evaluate its impact on supply chain resilience. The paper presents approaches that facilitate the comparability of resilience across alternative supply chain designs by combining various metrics into a single numerical index. Additionally, innovative technologies are highlighted that can help to create resilient supply chains.

The paper analyzes the improvement of resilience in logistics in contrast to lean management. First, possible success factors of resilience will be identified, including agility, redundancy in the form of capacity reserves, process transparency, management of personnel and risk, supply chain management and the formation of liquidity reserves. Eight face-to-face interviews with leading logistics companies will be conducted to examine these success factors. The aim is to identify best practice approaches for improving resilience and to examine possible conflicts of objectives with lean management.

Production automation is well established in large companies for high volume products. But robot-based assembly automation in mid-sized companies is still in its infancy. This study uses results from 19 expert interviews and a survey to identify obstacles to and drivers of automation in this field. Among the obstacles is the low flexibility of the robotic systems. One driver for automation is the increasing shortage of skilled workers. Based on the empirical findings, the study proposes options to increase the use of automation.

Global supply and value chains have become increasingly complex and interconnected, exposing companies to a range of risks caused by natural disasters, political instability, or global pandemics. The paper outlines some strategic options for companies to improve the resilience of their value chains, namely expansion of local or global supply chains, regional concentration or global diversification of production capacities, and insourcing or outsourcing activities. Data of 314 German manufacturing firms is used to investigate the influence of different digital technologies and adaptable production systems.

DisruptionsThe COVID-19 pandemic highlighted significant deficiencies in the value networks of the healthcare industry, as demands were not identified fast enough and production systems and processes could not be adapted quickly. The revealed need for resilience of companies in the healthcare industry must be addressed in order to prepare them for further disruptions and mitigate their consequences. Therefore, this paper presents a concept aimed at increasing the resilience of these companies.

The world economy is under tension. For years now, globalization has been faltering, moving sideways at best. Recent developments have caused additional distortions. There is now a strong desire for independence. In many places, subsidies are supposed to pave the way for this. In some areas, a veritable competition has broken out in this regard. Even if this is understandable from a political point of view, from an economic perspective the disadvantages of such a competition outweigh the benefits.

Artificial Intelligence methods can be structured according to different aspects. Applications within Industrie 4.0 can also be classified into levels and process groups using the RAMI framework or the ISA95 standard. However, a taxonomy is lacking that relates the classification of the application areas to the processes improved by machine learning methods while at the same time locating and evaluating them. Such a framework helps to classify new processes and solutions and supports finding suitable machine learning methods for concrete problems in the Industry 4.0 context.

The industrial internet-of-things is built on heterogeneous hardware/software platforms, which vary in their architecture and performance. Virtualization is an important technology for building secure and portable applications on scalable IoT deployments. Bytecode based virtual machines are coming back into focus with WebAssembly, a technology that started in the web browser and now raises interest in other use cases. In this paper we discuss a vision of scalable WebAssembly deployments in the industrial internet-of-things.