Modular, Digital Shopfloor Management Model – A Maturity Assessment For A Human-Oriented Transformation Process

Abstract

Currently digitization and Industry 4.0 are some of the most important trends influencing production processes and companies. In a lot of companies Shopfloor Management (SFM) is used to manage production and sustain as well as grow a strategic leadership through lean and efficient processes. Its main goal is to bring focus back to the shopfloor, where value-adding processes are performed, and to increase the connection between managers and shopfloor workers. In light of the aforementioned trend towards continued digitization, this produces a field of tension in which a trend enabling increasingly remote control of production through new digital solutions meets a principle focusing on being on site as well as intensive communication. Combing both aspects can prove to be complex as can be seen by studies showing a wide distribution of SFM in a selection of German production companies, but with exceptionally low usage of digital technology. A significant cause of this is the overwhelming number of possible aspects of Industry 4.0 increasing the difficulty of selecting manageable ideas, aggravated by a lack of integration of necessary employee and organizational change. Purpose of this paper is, therefore, to propose a theoretical basis for a digitization of SFM through the development of a model including disjunct aspects of SFM as well as a maturity index providing a means to discern different levels of digital solutions. To provide a practical viewpoint in addition to the theoretical basis, concrete SFM methods are collected and mapped to fitting areas as well as maturity levels of the underlying model. Additionally, a two-step questionnaire is conceived to allow for a selective proposition of said methods to derive an implementation sequence. All aspects of the approach are finally validated with an example company.