Christian Dölle

Hypotheses for a Theory of Production in the Context of Industrie 4.0

Significant increase in productivity of production systems has been an effect of all past industrial revolutions. In contrast to those industrial revolutions, which were driven by the production industry itself, Industrie 4.0 is pushed forward by an enormous change within the current society due to the invention and frequent usage of social networks in combination with smart devices. This new social behaviour and interaction now makes its presence felt in the industrial sector as companies use the interconnectivity in order to connect production systems and enhance collaboration. As employees bring their own smart devices to work the interconnectivity is brought into the companies as well and Industrie 4.0 is pushed into the companies rather than initiated by the companies themselves. On top of productivity improvement within production the fourth industrial revolution opens up new potentials in indirect departments such as engineering. This focus differentiates Industrie 4.0 from the first three industrial revolutions, which mainly focused on productivity increase by optimising the production process. Within the Cluster of Excellence “Integrative Production Technology for High-Wage Countries” of the RWTH Aachen University four mechanisms were developed which describe Industrie 4.0. The mechanisms “revolutionary product lifecycles”, “virtual engineering of complete value chains”, “better performing than engineered” and “revolutionary short value chains” can be achieved within an Industrie 4.0-environment. This environment is based on the four enablers “IT-Globalisation”, “single source of truth”, “automation” and “cooperation” and enhances collaboration productivity. Therefore the present paper examines and introduces hypotheses for a production theory in the context of Industrie 4.0. For each mechanism two hypotheses are presented which explain how the respective target state can be achieved. The transmission of these mechanisms into producing companies leads to an Industrie 4.0 capable environment strengthening competitiveness due to increased collaboration productivity within the direct and especially indirect departments. The specified hypotheses were developed within the framework of the Cluster of Excellence “Integrative Production Technology for High-Wage Countries” of the RWTH Aachen University.

Concept for development project management by aid of predictive analytics

Manufacturing companies in high wage countries strive towards shortened development and innovation cycles at decreased costs in order to strengthen their competitive advantage. These goals can be achieved by efficient development projects. However, approaches aiming at designing efficient development processes such as the value stream analysis only analyze development projects retrospectively as well as periodically and therefore do not continuously improve the efficiency of the respective projects themselves. Therefore, a concept is needed to anticipate deviations from the target process and thus inefficiencies within development projects by aid of predictive analytics. To derive a predictive analytics model, neural networks are applied to identify the impact of deviation indicators on the efficiency dimensions time, costs and quality of an activity. Upon reversion, it is possible to monitor the deviation indicators and use the respective indicator values as input for the neural networks. Based on the identified impact of the indicator on the efficiency dimensions, the neural network is able to predict the final values of an activity in terms of time, cost and quality. By comparing the predicted values with the defined target values, the deviation can be determined and preventive measures can be implemented to eliminate inefficiencies.

Towards a Technology-Oriented Theory of Production

Manufacturing companies in high-wage countries—one of the pillars of the European national economies—are particularly exposed to changes in global markets and rising market volatility. It is therefore necessary that manufacturers in these countries not only focus on reducing costs, but instead address the entire set of commonly defined operational capabilities: cost, quality, flexibility, and delivery performance. Although the optimization of these factors has been viewed since long as being largely mutually exclusive, we argue that advances in modern production technology might enable the resolution of the involved dichotomous relationships. In this chapter, we hence aim at presenting a technology-oriented theory of production that operationalizes the link between technological advances and possibilities to strengthen the four competitive priorities of manufacturing companies. For this purpose, existing production theories are first reviewed to ground and classify our theory. We subsequently formalize the technology-oriented theory by adopting a profitability assessment perspective derived from the insights of all projects within the Cluster of Excellence Integrative Production for High-Wage Countries.

Defining Agile Culture using Topic Modelling

The implementation of Agile Methods is often subject to failure, with cultural issues being the most commonly named reason. The purpose of this paper is to analyse the relationship between organizational culture and the deployment of Agile Methods. Built from a combination of systematic literature review and Latent Dirichlet Allocation, it presents a set of cultural characteristics that constitute a successful Agile organization. The results serve as a more robust definition of Agile Culture and help to assess an organization’s cultural readiness for the implementation of Agile Methods.

Agile-waterfall hybrid product development in the manufacturing industry — Introducing guidelines for implementation of parallel use of the two models

Agile development methods received a lot of attention throughout research and industry in recent years. Hybrid agile-waterfall models become increasingly prominent, mostly building one process model by combining elements of the two systems. We propose that there is reason to use the two of them parallel within the same product development project. Based on this assumption we present potential challenges faced in designing and managing such a project. We introduce a framework to categorize these, and suggest matching approaches to overcome them aimed for use by practitioners in the field.