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This whitepaper aims to extend the acatech Industrie 4.0 Maturity Index Framework. It supports organizations on their way to sustainable conduct by measuring readiness for sustainability. Action maxims regarding resources, information systems, organizational structures and culture are introduced and evaluated based on their impact.
A subscription business model - that sounds like significant economic advantages. Therefore, the question arises: Why haven't all manufacturing companies established this type of participative business model yet?
The answer: The development and implementation of subscription business models go hand in hand with central challenges that companies have to overcome in the course of a business model transformation. This expert paper helps with this.
Today, however, agility is seen more than ever as a critical success factor for companies. In times of an increasing degree of digital interconnection and minimum viable products, a mentality is entering the industrial service sector that has so far only been exemplified by Internet companies (e.g. Google): New products and especially digital services are developed in highly iterative processes. To this end, customers are involved in early test phases of development and provide feedback on individual functional modules, which – in contrast to the previous approach – are only gradually assembled into a market-ready “100 percent version”. But especially with the development of new digital services, companies must ensure more than ever that both the existing analog service business and the design of new digital services are geared to effectiveness and efficiency in order to meet the growing demands of customers and competitors.
To achieve this, companies must not only be familiar with the products currently on the market, but also master the entire product history, which in some cases goes back more than 30 years and varies greatly from one industry to another.
Today, maintenance exceeds this definition, it is significantly more.
In many companies, it plays the role of an incubator for development
and drives digital transformation forward. The very essence of
Industrie 4.0 is the optimisation of the flow of information within as
well as outside of a company to accelerate the adjustment of company
organisations in the context of increasing competitive pressure.
Because of the variety of interfaces, information and data that
is available as well as its service character, maintenance lends itself easily as the area of choice for a company to make Industrie 4.0 real. Whilst doing so, the aim is not to equip employees with the
latest “gimmick“ for order processment or to be the company with
the highest number of lighthouse projects. Instead, maintenance
ensures reliable and cost-efficient production and, consequently,
the primary creation of added value of the manufacturing company.
Those who were identified as top performers during the “Smart
Maintenance“ consortium benchmarking by FIR at RWTH Aachen
University gain particular useful ideas twice as often as other follower companies directly from staff, thus releasing the right potential.
Information and data help to reach these goals and transfer the
vision of smart maintenance into actual pratice. But what is smart
maintenance exactly and how far along are you in the development
of your individual smart maintenance concept?
[Study] Blockchain
(2019)
Distributed ledger technologies, of which the best known example is blockchain, were expected to make their big breakthrough in 2018. Instead, the opposite happened. Cryptocurrency price slumps and delays in promising projects became symptoms of a new sense of caution. Organizations tried to use blockchain in unsuitable applications, and underestimated implementation hurdles. Despite this, the need for effective data exchange and data management in today's connected world remains high. Decentralized solutions, intelligent sensors, global supply chains and vast quantities of customer data will further stimulate demand for specialized and powerful data management systems. Blockchain therefore remains one option to enable a secure and interconnected world. The following five-step approach will help you harness blockchain's potential, avoiding common mistakes and overcoming implementation hurdles on your way.
In the age of digitalization, IT strategies are becoming increasingly important. This is due to the fact that corporate IT is the key enabler of digitalization. In many companies, however, corporate IT is not well-aligned with the overall organizational strategy, preventing it from providing the best possible value for the different organizational units. A major challenge is posed by what we term IT complexity, which reduces efficiency and generates high costs for the corporate IT department.
This white paper outlines solutions for companies facing this issue. First, we provide an overview of the relevant terms and highlight the challenges confronting enterprises today. Central to this paper, we describe a four-step approach for the design development of an IT strategy. We introduce various tools with which to assess the current situation and identify relevant aspects of the business environment. Subsequently we outline an approach to strategy formulation and describe tools for strategy implementation and monitoring. Finally, an outlook into the future highlights what companies need to do to thrive into the future.
The change from the traditional to the digital service provider is not easy. The digital maturity level of many industrial companies is still too low to successfully place these digital service innovations on the market. One problem of service development is the increasing involvement of information and communication technology in service development and implementation. The additional technology makes the innovation processes for services on the part of manufacturers increasingly complex by involving different internal and external stakeholders (e.g. IT partners, data protection officers or product development departments). In addition to this, data-driven services also require that manufacturers (e.g. data scientists) develop new competencies in order to use the customer data obtained to increase machine productivity and to offer new business models. Furthermore, industrial companies that want to successfully offer data-driven services must develop new market introduction strategies to create a high degree of acceptance and trust among their customers. This is necessary to get access to relevant data. These and other challenges caused the success rate of companies in regarding the development of new, industrial services to shrink.
To change this, this white paper presents six principles that help industrial enterprises to develop new successful data-driven services.
The FIR at the RWTH Aachen University continuously develops the concept and the principles of RoM further. It is already noticeable that the gap between companies that began preparing their maintenance departments for Industrie 4.0 years ago and those that are still struggling with the mere foundations of a professional maintenance organisation is rapidly increasing.
The first driver of the development sparked by Industrie 4.0 is the collection of and work with condition data. It is used to create a digital shadow of a service, e.g. maintenance measures in a specific
context. In the future, critical machine functions will be monitored continuously within production processes.
Based on these observations, the likelihood of machine failures can be predicted, which makes it possible to prioritize data-based maintenance measures. This means that maintenance activities, i.e. production plans, are based on prognoses regarding machine failures. By doing so, the currently existing separation between inspection, maintenance and reactive measures can be overcome, resulting in a holistic approach to maintenance. Maintenance specialists receive support from assistance systems, which give them access to all relevant information (e.g. machine history, spare part availability, proposals for measures, etc.). As a result, they can take on routine tasks in different areas as well and contribute to the increased flexibility of the production process. Although data is becoming an increasingly important driver of successful maintenance strategies,
maintenance employees continue to be central to specific tasks, machines and systems. In the future, it can be expected that they choose to become experts in a certain field and, ideally, actively share their knowledge with others within an open maintenance culture. Systems for interdisciplinary collaboration will be made part of everyday practice.
The maintenance department will be a center and distributor of knowledge in the agile company of the future.Only through the interaction of the outlined success principles, which amount to a paradigm shift within the maintenance department, the potential
benefit of maintenance as defined by RoM can be fully exploited, creating a long-term competitive advantage for those who consistently follow the path towards Industrie 4.0 in maintenance.
Industrial manufacturers faced and mastered several economic challenges and disruptive changes in the past. In particular, changes to business models emerge very slowly, whereas crises such as the banking crisis or covid-19 outbreak lead to significant short-term effects and are difficult to manage.
Over the past year, the world experienced an unprecedented form of disruption due to the global covid-19 pandemic. Compared to former economic crises, the implications of social distancing, lockdowns, and supply chain shortages triggered a rapid economic and societal disruption at a global scale, which impacted all sectors and levels of society.
For a holistic understanding of the impact of the current and former crises on industrial manufacturers, the Institute for Industrial Management at RWTH Aachen and BearingPoint conducted a survey as well as expert interviews to investigate the scope and type of affects for industrial manufacturers with a strong focus on service business. Based on this a framework to successfully address these new challenges and – also – opportunities was developed.