Evolving manufacturing mobility in Industry 4.0: the case of process industries

Abstract

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to present an approach to incorporating mobility into continuous manufacturing following the advent of Industry 4.0 (I4.0). Design/methodology/approach The investigation is based on a year-long canonical action research into a paper-manufacturing company implementing core I4.0 technologies. Findings The findings show how to: classify manufacturing mobility strategy based on the dimensions of team, task and control; design business processes enabled by mobile cyber–physical resources; involve different stakeholders in modeling mobility; and create a comprehensive guide to assist in implementing the mobile digitalization required by I4.0. Research limitations/implications Despite the complexity, richness and depth of the insights obtained in this research for mobility management in process industries, this inquiry was conducted in a single organization. Practical implications As the fourth industrial revolution encourages decentralization and increased interaction between humans and machines, this paper presents a model to capture the mobility potential in manufacturing. The tools proposed in this research can be used to steer investments in industry transformations that fuse the physical and digital worlds, overcoming mobility constraints. Originality/value Theoretically, this paper expands the concept of manufacturing mobility in I4.0. In practice, it proposes a participative roadmap to assist technology management in increasingly decentralized environments, identifying the intertwined network of cyber–physical actors, processes and services.

Human resource practices accompanying industry 4.0 in European manufacturing industry

“…Initially, Industry 4.0 implementation was approached mainly from a technical point of view, only gradually incorporating its organizational and human implications (Kiel et al , 2017; Kopp et al , 2019; Barata et al , 2020). For example, a technical integration of production processes needs to be complemented with an organizational integration of business units such as production, quality control and maintenance to guarantee timely and efficient problem solving (Barata et al , 2020). When looking at the human aspect, the increasing complexity of production processes requires swift and autonomous decision making of operators, which contrasts sharply with the traditional command-and-control approach in industry.…”

“…Subsequently, tasks will shift from predominantly operations-related tasks to increasingly dispositive, coordination and decision-making tasks such as planning or supervision (Veile et al , 2019; Ghobakhloo and Fathi, 2020). This implies tasks with higher complexity as operators will have to engage in problem-solving activities (Flores et al , 2020) and will face regular changes of tasks (Barata et al , 2020). In addition, decentralization of production processes requires operators with greater autonomy to be able to flexibly deal with their increased job complexity (Rauch et al , 2019).…”

“…HR practices refer in this study to ways companies organize work and manage employees to achieve their organizational goals (Taylor et al , 2020). More recent roadmaps (Ghobakhloo, 2018), frameworks (Veile et al , 2019; Barata et al , 2020) and maturity models (Santos and Martinho, 2019) that cover the implementation of Industry 4.0 focus on several HR practices of which three are frequently mentioned. Firstly, employee involvement in the implementation of new technology is expected to both improve the quality of decisions (Mládková, 2018; Kaasinen et al , 2020) and prevent employee resistance (Ghobakhloo and Fathi, 2020).…”

Impact of Resources on the Development of Local Entrepreneurship in Industry 4.0

“…Taking into account both the enormous changes in the Polish economy and the development of Industry 4.0, one can formulate a thesis that the results related to human capital are so high as a result of mutual support of global and national trends. The intensification of the human-machine relation resulting from the development of Industry 4.0 [70], puts greater demands on employees, which increases the importance of human capital. The need to develop human capital in companies introducing technologies 4.0 is also confirmed by other studies [71].…”

Innovations in Workforce Management: Challenges in the Fourth Industrial Revolution

“…The future industrial businesses will provide less easy and repetitive but more advanced and complex tasks (Becker and Stern, 2016). The application of digital technologies encourages decentralization and increases the interaction between humans and machines (Barata et al, 2019). Also, many jobs are rapidly disappearing because their tasks are automated, which applies both to low-skilled manual and routine jobs and increasingly to medium-skilled specialized jobs and even high-skilled complex jobs (Marengo, 2019).…”