TAF PUBLISHING

The competitive pressure induced by progressing globalization has forced companies to find new ways of differentiation. Industry 4.0, as the synonym for the next significant step in value creation advancement, offers new technologies and procedures to obtain further improvements in competitiveness. The real-time networking of people, machines, and objects is not only an opportunity to leverage productivity potentials; it also enables new data-driven business models to achieve an increase in revenues. Although the concept and enablers of industry 4.0 are widely known across the producing industry, companies struggle with its successful and sustainable implementation. Due to the often insufficient embedding of individual solutions in a coherent overall concept, implemented solutions cannot exploit potential synergies within the company. The presented paper introduces a framework to control and synchronize Industry 4.0 activities within a company centrally. By integrating bottom-up and top-down perceptions, the framework facilitates the early identification and assessment of potential industry 4.0 applications and efficient development of specific solutions up to the implementation in series production. Consisting of an operationalization process and an organizational model optimized for horizontal and vertical exchange within the company, the framework enables faster and more robust implementation of industry 4.0.