manufacturing companies

German industrial companies are suffering from an increasing shortage of skilled workers. In order to secure Germany’s existing competitive advantages, suitable solutions have to be carried out to counter this shortage. Technologies in the context of “Industry 4.0” offer promising solutions. Using this technologies, significant productivity improvements as well as higher resource utilization rates can be achieved. However, the main challenge is to identify the right technical solutions for the specific business challenges. In the following, a systematic approach is presented to face these challenges.

Blockchain technology (BCT) is one of the most promising technologies of the present that will be of even greater importance in the future, especially for manufacturing companies, in order to improve cross-company collaboration and make processes more transparent to the customer. However, BCT is not yet widely used as a trusted tool to ensure a clean and unadulterated flow of information. In addition to the potential, this paper discusses the challenges for the use of BCT and derives a solution concept based on the St. Gallen Management Model that shows potential BCT users possible application scenarios.