Digitale Transformation

Industry 4.0 requires new teaching content due to its innovation potential. Skills profiles currently in demand often aren't reflected in vocational and tertiary education. Additionally, conventional further education and training often costs considerably money and time. Tailor-made learning opportunities and teaching targeted problem-solving skills in a modular learning factory are a more effective approach.

Digital transformation is a crucial factor for the competitiveness of companies. This article explores obstacles and their interrelationships in establishing digital business models in medium-sized family businesses as well as initial approaches to overcoming these obstacles.

New types of value creation characterized by extensive data use and cross-company data sharing are becoming increasingly important for companies. However, many barriers slow down the path towards data-based value creation, especially for SMEs. Companies often lack specific ideas for data usage or digitalization and data competencies. As a result, there is often untapped value creation potential in companies. By describing a real laboratory setting with real experiments, this article demonstrates support options for companies to identify their own "data treasure" and to lift it.

A successful digital transformation for attaining Industry 4.0, is a crucial success criterion for many companies today. The ongoing global COVID-19 pandemic has shown the need for digitalization in companies and has further accelerated this development. However, these times, companies are confronted with an uncertain order and profit situation. Thus, they need to allocate their investments purposefully. Evaluating the digital maturity by using a profound indicator system is therefore a sound basis for decision making. This paper develops such a sociotechnical KPI model along the dimensions “Strategy and Organizational Leadership”, “Digital Skills/Human Capital” as well as “Smart Process/Operations”. In the future, this model can be used for determining the digital maturity and thus, it can be applied for allocating digitalization investments.