productivity

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.

Opportunities arising from new technologies like smart mobile devices and augmented reality have a huge impact on the manufacturing industry but are not taken advantage of when it comes to productivity analysis. As a consequence productivity analyses are rarely used and companies cannot benefit from a systematic approach to tackle improvement processes. This paper presents a productivity analysis method that uses a web-based application for data acquisition and is designed in a way that enables production staff to perform analyses on their own.

Technicians and service operators in machine and plant engineering need more and more information to assemble the more complex products. Additional effort is necessary, when technicians have to document their work progress or report problems. One reason for this is that production is generally not integrated into the digital flow of information. Case studies from the industry show the high potential of innovative software solutions by integrating the production perfectly into the digital information flow.

The one-of-a-kind production often is characterized by a high share in manual work. Information gathering requires an essential percentage of the workers time. The article shows as Augmented Reality can help to reduce the efforts of information gathering and to increase productivity.

It is against the background of Industrie 4.0 that profound knowledge of the principles and basics of manual work or efficient work design, respectively, gains particular importance. It will continue to be a fair and neutral reference basis for the design of productive and ergonomic work in the Smart Factory. By collecting both time-relevant and ergonomically relevant data, MTM-HWD® (Human Work Design) a new MTM (Methods-Time Measurement) building block system offers an unprecedented quality in describing and evaluating human work. It, thus, combines work method-oriented with ergonomic work design.

Increased productivity is a fundamental paradigm of successful business. No wonder management efforts are focused primarily on this “golden calf” of the market economy. There are enough scientific publications dealing with this topic to fill libraries. Never before have we seen so many students educated in the field of Economics at university level. Despite knowing a great deal about tools, methods and procedures, at the place where value is created we continue to think about the same questions and the same productivity deficits: Why is it that companies continue to lose the ability to maintain lean, productive processes in spite of having access to all instruments in the field of Economics? Why do many companies permit the growth of unproductive performance even though they have just introduced controlling instruments to prevent this from happening? Why is it so difficult to achieve significant, sustainable productivity growth even though companies often have access to a broad ...