learning factory

Trends towards more customized products and shorter product life cycles are creating challenges, which companies are trying to meet with the use of Industrie 4.0 technologies. The digitalization and automation associated with this is causing employees in the manufacturing industry in particular to fear changes in work processes and requirements. This paper proposes four key socio-technical design measures to enable enterprises to cope with the new demands of human work in Industrie 4.0 - and thus to counteract fears. The focus is on increasing entrepreneurial agility and expanding employee skills.

This article deals with the presentation of a concept that shows new possibilities for a holistic improvement in the company’s internal resource efficiency by using Industry 4.0. Subsequently, the structure of a resource management system will be shown. To attain a holistic improvement of the resource efficiency, the viewing frame will be extended to the whole product lifecycle to show which potentials a coupling along the entire value-added chain provides.

The Green Factory Bavaria is a research project, in which a platform at several locations in Bavaria is developed, in order to increase the resource efficiency in manufacturing companies. The platform shall serve as research-, demonstration- and training purposes. In Augsburg a process chain was developed, which consists of an additive manufacturing step, a cleaning and a packaging step. The research foci of those areas as well as the training concept are going to be presented in this article.

Industrial work 4.0 challenges workers due to ambiguity, self-organization, and interconnec-tedness. To qualify workers to successfully cope with these challenges, this article introduces the software-based situational learning factory that is completed like a flight simulator. By playing these so called serious games that simulate situations on the shop floor of varying complexity, employees gain experiential knowledge and improve their IT-skills.

The sustainable implementation of efficient processes requires a corporate culture that ensures continuous optimization. In order to achieve this level of operational excellence employees’ capabilities must be developed with regard to the identification and active pursuit of improvements. For this purpose, lean management principles and tools have to be implemented at all hierarchy levels (lean thinking). In many instances, learning factories have proved to be an appropriate platform to support this process of transformation. For the first time in Germany, this concept has now been transferred to the process industry with its special requirements by realizing a learning factory within a pharmaceutical company. The procedure of planning and deploying this industry-specific learning environment with the identified success factors are discussed in this paper.

The term Industry 4.0 has changed from a fashionable issue to a serious research and future-topic in industrial production. Research organisations work on sophisticated technologies and concepts to implement this fourth industrial revolution, research grants are provided generously and model factories get decorated. However, many companies still cannot understand the term industry 4.0 and the related consequences on their own business. Especially small and medium sized enterprises have not understood the benefits. For that reason the currently existing learning factory at the institute of industrial management and innovation research at Graz University of Technology is enlarged to an industry 4.0 learning factory. The concept behind is the object of this article.

A closer look at the population pyramid shows the ongoing demographic change. The number of employees that are due to retire on account of their advanced age will increase significantly in the next years. Without further actions the knowledge and practical expertise of these experienced employees will no longer be available in the company. The preservation of the practical knowledge by the integration of digital media in an industrial production environment is subject of the article and is verified by the learning factory of the chair of production systems.

Increasingly complex and technology-driven markets require a broad knowledge and qualifications of professionals in manufacturing companies. The range of needs for long-term competitive knowledge adaptation is versatile. Especially in view of the forecasted lack of qualified young people, it is more important to sustainably educate existing staff. Thus it is necessary to create sustainable and innovative learning environments which provide the necessary knowledge, qualifications and skills. An adequate and consistent concept represents the advanced Learning Factory (aLF) and is discussed in this paper.

Sustainability in lean production systems arises when the relevant lean principles are addressed by preferably all stakeholders in the context of permanent improvement processes. For this purpose a skills development of all employees is necessary, even for managers, as they convey the CIP position by their people skills and set an example. If this succeeds, improvement processes will develop into a sustainable learning process, which in turn serves as a self-reinforcing factor for the further development of staff skills. An approach to skills development and to the corresponding leadership system for improvement processes is presented and supported by preliminary results of an empirical study.