risk management

Digital transformation processes have a high tendency for delay, exceeding costs, and failure. This poses a significant risk in competitive global markets and shifting business models of entire industries. Successful companies have a different approach to new technologies than more traditional incumbents. Including the workforce in the transformation via change leadership in a digital transformation coaching process can reduce fear and resistance and can lead to a paradigm shift of approaching the digital transformation itself: as an agility driven, infinite game with high potential gain.

The planning and implementation of automated warehouses is characterized by high investments and risks. The FMEA (Failure Mode and Effects Analysis) currently used to reduce risks requires a great deal of effort to conduct, as it has deficits in terms of design and implementation support. These deficits include a predominant focus on the process view without linking this to the design FMEA for automation objects, an insufficient structure for the use of similar repetitive processes and technologies, a lack of automated, parameterized generation of activities, failures and causes, and a lack of integrated test scenario derivation. These deficits lead to unrecognized failures and increase the effort required to carry out the FMEA and develop test scenarios. In this article, we present a generic FMEA model which, among other things, is able to access extensive practical data in the form of knowledge bases and thus resolve the aforementioned deficits.

Procurement has the task of providing an organization with required but not self-produced goods. Due to the collapse of global supply chains during the SARS-COV2 pandemic, procurement faced major challenges. Goods that were actually easily available on global markets became critical bottlenecks. It turned out that additive manufacturing can mitigate these bottlenecks. For example, medical spare parts were produced using additive manufacturing. This article examines how additive manufacturing is changing the procurement risk of materials. A comparison is made between traditional and additive supply possibilities based on a survey. The result is a combined procurement strategy, which ensures an improved availability of critical goods.

The current corona crisis shows that companies can be unprepared for events that threaten even successful and healthy companies in their existence from one day to the next. In addition to a pandemic, there are other risks for companies which can also threaten the continued existence of a company. The best way to protect a company from the consequences of damaging and crisis events is to prepare for them. One method for this is Business Continuity Management. “Business Continuity Management (BCM)” describes the active planning, control and safeguarding of the long-term existence and success of a company through the realisation of organisational resilience against events that damage the business. The article describes a BCM model that was developed and implemented in practice as part of a corporate project.

In many companies there is still a lack of clarity about the “right” way to implement digitalization projects. Therefore, the article describes guidelines for the successful implementation of digitalization projects. They are derived from the experience of various practical projects and include considerations of economic efficiency as well as resources and staff. Structured as “Ten Commandments for Digitalization Projects”, they are designed to support actors in the practical implementation of digitalization projects

In terms of Industrie 4.0, especially SMEs are facing the challenge of integrating data both vertically and horizontally. To achieve this task, common solutions such as ERP are increasingly replaced by manufacturing executions systems (MES). Due to the direct connection in production, MES allow a production control and serve as bridge between planning and manufacturing level. Data integration is furthermore the basis for an automated risk management in production. The research project quadrika develops an MES module that predictively recognizes risks and thus prevents faults.

In the last few years, the private sector and international organizations have propagated numerous standards and norms, which prescribe some strict measures to protect supply chains. Security in the supply chain can be significantly increased with only a few principles. Against the backdrop of the many already existing initiatives, we discuss whether and how these could contribute to the supply chain security of companies. We aim at developing practitioner recommendations, especially for small and medium-sized enterprises without own security routines. These recommendations may serve as a guide and help to establish a management system for supply chain security.

External turbulences affecting producing industries are increasing because of rising natural and geopolitical changes. Due to this extended turbulences the vulnerability of today’s highly linked and complex supply chains of producing companies is rising. In terms of avoiding actual and future instabilities, critical processes need to be designed robust and flexible and to be monitored continuously. In order to initiate the necessary actions to guarantee the security of supply, critical processes have to be identified. For the evaluation of actual or future critical processes criticality gets introduced. So the influence of extended turbulences can be identified and possible instabilities can be detected and anticipated.

The impact of industrial production on the climate is discussed in science, but also in politics. Adaptation to the impacts of climate change, such as better flood protection, is also examined. The aspects of manufacturing companies have been considered inadequately. Classical approaches of factory planning take climatic conditions only for location finding into account. Here the climate is considered to be static, when dynamic influence quantity. This has the consequence that the risk of climate change impacts in the planning of factories is not considered. In this paper, an approach to identify and highlight the growing risks is described.