Daniela Hobscheidt successfully completed her doctorate on the topic of "Solution patterns for the socio-technical design of Industry 4.0 in SMEs" under Prof Dr.-Ing. Roman Dumitrescu.
Summary of the doctoral dissertation:
The megatrend of digital transformation offers enormous potential for increasing efficiency in the production and business processes of manufacturing companies, known as Industry 4.0. The design of Industry 4.0 is to be understood as a socio-technical task that affects not only technologies, but also humans and entire organizational structures. In this context, especially medium-sized enterprises seem to face challenges in implementing Industry 4.0. A lack of solution knowledge is one reason that identification of the appropriate Industry 4.0 solutions for the specific problems from the multitude of possibilities is a core challenge for them. The reuse of knowledge with the help of solution patterns is one approach to meet this core challenge.
The aim of this work is therefore to create solution patterns for the socio-technical design of Industry 4.0 in medium-sized enterprises. The fundament forms a structuring framework as a reference model for the dimensions of people, organization and technologies specifically for Industry 4.0. Based on this, solution patterns are derived from 87 successful Industry 4.0 projects, documented transparently and bundled into consistent combinations for socio-technical problem classes. The application is exemplarily demonstrated by an SME in the field of air conditioning and exhaust technology through using a process model and tools.
