FIR e. V. an der RWTH Aachen
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Towards a Methodology to Determine Intersubjective Data Values in Industrial Business Activities
(2021)
This paper contributes to a valuation framework for valuing data as an intangible asset. Especially those industrial manufacturers developing and delivering holistic digital solutions are limited in calculating the true business value of data initiatives. Since the value of data is strongly dependent on the respective use case, a completely objective valuation is not possible. This complicates decision-making on the internal side regarding investments in digital transformation, and on the external side to communicate existing benefits to third parties via financial reporting. Therefore, the target is to design a valuation framework that allows industrial manufacturers to determine an intersubjective, i.e., traceable and transparent, data value. In order to develop a framework that can be applied in practice, the approach is based on industrial case study research.
Digitalization and Industry 4.0 continue to shape our industrial environment and collaboration. For many enterprises, a key challenge in moving forward in this matter is the integration of their shop-floor systems (hard- and software) with their office-floor systems to harvest the full potential of industry 4.0.
A multitude of different technologies and respective use-cases available on the market leave many companies startled. This paper presents a set of use-cases for IT-OT-Integration to bring transparency into a company’s digital transformation.
Additionally, a technical requirements profile for integrating IT- and OT-Systems based on the use cases is presented. Both, use-cases and their requirements, guide companies in selecting the digitalization measures that fit their current situation and help in identifying technical challenges that need to be addressed in the transformation process.
Digitalization offers enormous opportunities not only to optimize operational processes, but also to redefine creative processes, e.g., in the area of innovation. This is becoming increasingly important in light of the fact that innovation is increasingly taking place in ecosystems, which means that an enormous amount of collaboration must be enabled in distributed and interdisciplinary teams. To be successful in this, innovation teams need easy access to the multitude of methods and assistance in selecting the appropriate method for the specific task. To this end, we propose a classification framework that structures methods from innovation management and service design based on higher-level task areas. The framework was developed and evaluated together with several companies. Results were implemented in the form of a playbook that won the red dot design award. [https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-80840-2_22]
Since data becomes more and more important in industrial context, the question arises on how data-driven added value can be measured consistently and comprehensively by manufacturing companies. Currently, attempts on data valuation are primarily taking place on internal company level and qualitative scale. This leads to inconclusive results and unused opportunities in data monetization. Existing approaches in theory to determine quantitative data value are seldom used and less sophisticated. Although quantitative valuation frameworks could enable entities to transfer data valuation from an internal to an external level to take account of progress in digital transformation into external reporting. This paper contributes to data value assessment by presenting a four-part valuation framework that specifies how to transfer internal, qualitative to external, quantitative data valuation. The proposed framework builds on insights derived from practice-oriented action research. The framework is finally tested with a machine tool manufacturer using a single case study approach. Placing value on data will contribute to management’s capability to manage data as well as to realize data-driven benefits and revenue. [https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-85902-2_19]
Low-Level-Code Based Production Model For Improving Material Requirements Planning In ERP Systems
(2021)
Single and small-series production companies face specific challenges, such as variable customer order decoupling points (CODP), decreasing quantities and rising cost pressure. This leads to a increasing production complexity and growing requirements on Production Planning and Control (PPC). Digitalization’s direct links between objects, people, and machines as well as detailed recording of production progresses opens new solutions for PPC. However, volume of data and the required processing times are increasing. Thus, to achieve near-real-time data processing, a decentralization of decision-making systems can be observed. The function Material Requirements Planning (MRP) is PPC’s original need for Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems. Here, PPC’s overall problem (to fulfil primary requirements for products) is divided into subproblems (to fulfil single production orders). Especially companies characterized by an organization in accordance to the workshop principle, high in-house production depth and variable CODP are confronted with high dynamics in their production systems. This ends in significant differences between primary requirements (overall problem) and single production orders (subproblems). Ultimately, these insufficient PPC data result systematically in a non-optimal overall solution despite optimal partial solutions. This publication combines PPC’s fundamentals from existing commonly known models with current implementation concepts of ERP systems. A newly developed Low-Level-Code based Production Model provides explanations for deviations between the overall problem and its subproblems. Furthermore, information flows of PPC can be structured between a periodically actualized vertical and an event driven horizontal information flow. These recognitions lead to an improvement of PPC by ERP systems.
Industrial practice shows a strong trend towards digitalization. It is not only economic crises, such as those triggered by Covid-19, that are reinforcing this trend. It is also the entrepreneurial urge to fulfill customer wishes in the best possible way and to adapt to new requirements as quickly as possible. Due to the advancing digitalization, the role of business application systems in manufacturing companies is therefore becoming increasingly important. The data processed in IT-Systems represent a great potential, especially for the evaluation of change requests in production. Through efficient change management, companies can record and process changes quickly. However, the necessary data basis to decide on existing change requests is still hardly used. Existing IT-Systems for change management coordinate the processing of change requests, but do not relate to data of operational application systems such as Enterprise-Resource-Planning. Therefore, a conceptual approach is required for the evaluation of change requests. This approach is based on an objective recording system that enables the transformation from the change description to an evaluation space. The paper presents an approach for the systematic transfer of requirement characteristics into the world of operational IT-Systems.
The Impact Of Manufacturing Execution Systems On The Digital Transformation Of Production Systems
(2021)
With the focus of manufacturing companies on the digital transformation, Manufacturing Execution Systems are market-ready, modular software solutions for manufacturing companies to integrate the value-adding and supporting processes horizontal and vertical in the company. Companies, especially small and mediumsized companies, face high internal and external costs for the implementation of the MES modules. An advantage of MES is the possibility to implement the systems in a continually, module-by-module approach, with the benefit of timely distributed investments. By realizing fast improvements, companies can use the benefits for further module implementations. This paper proposes a maturity model to measure the impact of an MES on the digital transformation of the company’s production systems. The model fulfils two purposes. The first, companies can measure the impact based on the difference between its current maturity index and the potential index of an implemented MES. The second is, the user can identify what impact an MES has in general on the digital transformation since the developed maturity model is derived from an established industry 4.0 maturity model. The development of the maturity model is based on the methodologies of AKKASOGLU and focuses on the further development of an established model. As an outlook, the application of the model will be described briefly. The proposed maturity model can directly be used by practitioners and offers implications for further development of MES functionalities.
Pricing for Smart-Product-Service-Systems in Subscription Business Models for Production Industries
(2021)
In the production industry, subscription business models have the potential to create long-term relationships where a supplier provides a continuous value-oriented service to a customer based on digitalisation. Monetising this increase in value through pricing represents a central challenge for suppliers in subscription business. Unlike the current dominant transactional business, the focus of pricing is on the value-in-use of the customer (e.g. on the increase in output for the customer). In this regard, there is so far no pricing approach for practice that allows the linking of the performance data of the customer with the periodically charged price. However, in subscription businesses, such an approach is required to create win-win situations for the customer and supplier through continuous performance improvement. Therefore, this paper develops a novel process model for pricing of smart-product-service-systems in subscription business for production industries. This process can serve as basis for suppliers of subscriptions in the production industry to align pricing with the created value-in-use. In the long term, this allows companies to systematically develop their pricing to monetise the potential of digitalisation.
Electricity generated by wind turbines (WT) is a pillar of the transition to renewable energy [1]. In order to economically utilize WTs, operating and maintenance costs, which account for 25% of total electricity generation costs in onshore WTs, are a focus of cost reduction activities [2]. A prescriptive maintenance approach can support in achieving this goal. Prescriptive maintenance is a maintenance approach, where asset condition data is collected and analyzed to recommend specific actions to prevent breakdowns and reduce downtimes. However, the processing and analysis of data is quite complex. Especially unstructured data (such as comments of service technicians in free text fields) is often left unused, as companies, mostly SMEs lack the capacity to carry out these analyses. In this work we propose an approach to utilize the information from service reports, maintenance reports as well as status records from SCADA systems for the development of a prescriptive maintenance approach to onshore WTs. To achieve this, an ontology was utilized in this approach to codify implicit knowledge of service technicians and aid in making unstructured data usable for further analysis. The ontology was used to link historical service and maintenance reports with status codes, thus enabling automated analysis. In interviews with WT topic experts and through further research, damage mechanisms and corresponding maintenance measures were identified and a measure catalogue was developed to support service and maintenance activities. The recognition of the root cause of problems allows for a prescriptive maintenance approach that recommends targeted actions to reduce downtimes and optimize maintenance activities, it also allows to effectively control the outcome of maintenance activities and optimize their execution.
The digital transformation brings up various new tasks to manage new business application software and integrate them into existing business processes and legacy systems, which are necessary to keep e.g. a production system running. Today, all these tasks are on the one hand not clearly defined and on the other hand, responsibility of these cross-disciplinary tasks is unclear in companies being mostly structured in a function-oriented way. While quality management has developed to a firmly established function of process excellence years ago, IT-application management is still to become an inevitable part of the digital transformation. There are just a few authors trying to define and describe this part, the related tasks, and necessary roles in an organization. In this paper, we show how the business needs of a company can influence the ideal adaptation of the digitization solutions and thus become the success of the digital transformation. We base the paper on a use case in manufacturing companies. We then describe how companies deal with business application systems today. Based on the framework Aachen Digital Architecture Management we describe how a company can holistically improve the management of business application systems.