Digitalisierung

Assembly is an important part of industrial production and is also characterized by a high proportion of manual work. Manufacturing companies have an intrinsic interest in increasing personnel productivity and preventing unit labor costs from rising. Many thus hope to gain economic benefits by implementing digitalization projects. The potential of digitalization in assembly must be exploited to achieve these goals.

Change is necessary for companies to maintain their competitive edge—both digital and ecological change. But while external support is at hand, the drive for change must come from companies themselves. In this issue of Industry 4.0 Science, experts of the Academic Society for Work and Industrial Organization discuss how the real-world application of innovative technologies lead to resource-efficient manufacturing.

In the course of digitalization, collaboration between humans and machines is inevitable. This should be considered as early as possible in further training. There’s a major obstacle to this in mechanical engineering: the lack of access to the knowledge needed for success. This can have a negative impact on the acceptance of digitalized processes. A teaching and learning platform teaching digitalization on real machines does important work here.

Alongside sustainability, sustainability management is also gaining in importance. At the same time, digitalization continues to advance, embedded in a complex interplay of economic, ecological and social challenges. A sustainability platform that not only records relevant company data, but also ensures the necessary security, can unleash synergies between transformative trends to foster sustainable and efficient corporate development.

In order to cope with growing customer requirements and the associated increase in complexity, companies are opening up their value chains, reducing their vertical integration and increasingly entering into collaborations. Cross-company data exchange along the supply chain is thus becoming a key component for competitiveness and the realization of customer-specific solutions. For this reason, the European Union has launched the GAIA-X project, which aims to create the next generation of data infrastructure for Europe and its companies. The GAIA-X maturity model offers an approach for classifying companies into different development stages and provides concrete requirements for further development along a predefined development path towards becoming a fully-fledged participant in the federated GAIA-X data infrastructure.