Towards the Industry 4.0 agenda: Practitioners' reasons why a digital transition of shop floor management visualization boards is warranted

Fitting digital visualization board transitions to shop floor tasks

“…Manufacturers customize VB layouts using diverse design principles to align with shop-floor tasks (Few, 2006). This results in various VB types, like PM VBs for clear data communication (Parry & Turner, 2006) and CI VBs with adaptable interfaces for manual drawings (Clausen, 2023). Current shop-floor PM VBs and CI VBs are analog media-based, entailing paper strips, charts, tokens, and whiteboards, to handle tasks (Bateman, 2020;Beynon-Davies & Lederman, 2017;Clausen et al, 2020).…”

“…However, the ongoing digital transition of manufacturing is reshaping how to handle shop-floor tasks. Consequently, OM researchers have proposed that the digital transition of VBs offers unparalleled opportunities for enhancing transparency regarding the status of manufacturing shop floors (Bateman, 2020;Clausen, 2023;Meissner et al, 2020;Torres et al, 2019). In pursuit of this objective, a stream of researchers has showcased the practicality of employing digital VBs on the shop floor.…”

“…In a study of 16 international manufacturing industries, Clausen (2023) suggested that the main hurdle for the digital transition of VBs is inappropriate enterprise architectures in terms of capturing data and accessing real-time data. Despite that, practitioners are devising easily installable solutions utilizing visualization software like Microsoft Power BI, despite knowing that these solutions fall short in terms of providing fit in handling shop-floor tasks (Clausen, 2023).…”

“…In a study of 16 international manufacturing industries, Clausen (2023) suggested that the main hurdle for the digital transition of VBs is inappropriate enterprise architectures in terms of capturing data and accessing real-time data. Despite that, practitioners are devising easily installable solutions utilizing visualization software like Microsoft Power BI, despite knowing that these solutions fall short in terms of providing fit in handling shop-floor tasks (Clausen, 2023). OM researchers have underscored the significance of visualization software, such as Tableau, Infogram, and Microsoft Power BI, for introducing novel opportunities and thereby providing new VB functionalities (Basole, 2019;Mortenson et al, 2015).…”

“…The digital transition of visualization boards (VBs) offers unprecedented transparency for monitoring manufacturing shop-floor activities in the context of smart manufacturing (Torres et al, 2019). As technological devices, VBs provide functionalities tailored to fit shop-floor tasks (Bateman et al, 2016;Bendoly, 2016;Clausen, 2023;Fullerton et al, 2014). With the potential for novel functionalities to arise due to this digital transition (Mourtzis et al, 2022) and the growing importance of data in task handling (Jwo et al, 2021), an empirical investigation into the functionalities of both current and emerging VBs for shop-floor tasks becomes essential.…”