Smart Manufacturing Through Digital Shop Floor Management Boards

Abstract

Smart manufacturing, an offspring from Industry 4.0 (I4.0), defines the future for the manufacturing industry. Smart manufacturing leads to digitalization of the shop floor, which is automated, computerized and complex. To stay competitive, digitalization of the shop floor management (SFM) boards will be instrumental in improving performance management and continuous improvement. The purpose of this paper is to improve the understanding of SFM board meetings in the era of I4.0. The paper explores the current adaptation level of digital SFM boards, and identifies influencing forces for and forces against a further transition from analogue to digital SFM boards. Based on a survey and a subsequent workshop with practitioners, this paper reveals that digital SFM boards have not yet been adapted at shop floor level, and currently, practitioners are stuck to the standardized procedures and manual processes. The forces against a further adaptation are a managerial mindset stuck in an Industry 2.0 era and immature technologies to digitize the visualization of real-time data. The forces for are the need of enhancing data transparency within and across teams, which means elimination of information silos and timeconsuming manual updates of SFM boards.

Digital Visualisation Tools to Bridge Communication Across Manufacturing – A Transdisciplinary Journey

“…However, in the light of implementing digital solutions on the shop floor to increase performance, both academia and manufacturing now propose having a digital transformation of the VBs [7,25,26]. Given the new technological opportunities for connectivity of systems, analytics, and visualisation, VBs are considered a potential target for a digital transformation.…”

“…Following the technology management literature, a digital transformation on the shop floor seems to constitute a straightforward way forward [14,15,27]; however, this does not seem to be the case regarding VBs. A study performed by Clausen et al [26] reveals that the current widespread use of analogue VBs is prone to both social and technical hindrances and is regarded as a problem of a transdisciplinary character.…”

“…According to Clausen et al [26], manufacturing is trapped by the difficulty of overcoming the technical system requirements. It seems that poor conditions for automated data acquisition, access to valid data, inconsistent IT systems and immature IT architectures are hindering the integration of information and knowledge across manufacturing and thereby the digital transformation of VBs.…”

“…Furthermore, Meissner et al [24] and Clausen et al [26] address some of the social aspects to consider in having a digital transformation of VBs. They portray the cultural challenges of managing the transition processes of technical and organisational issues, as the transition processes call for changing the habitual way of working.…”

Developing a prescriptive decision support system for shop floor control

“…While descriptive analysis techniques have been used widely for drawing insights through patterns and trends of available information, use of predictive techniques has gained significant interest as a means to identify the potential risk to manufacturers (Flath and Stein, 2018). As a latest addition to this set, prescriptive design of operations is attracting a lot of research interest (Clausen et al ., 2020).…”