Smart factory mapping and design: methodological approaches

Several studies show a demand for further transfer of Industry 4.0 concepts and technologies into practice. This paper describes how companies can be supported methodologically to identify individual opportunities for optimization within their future smart factories. Existing methods are screened, recombined, and enhanced to create a sufficient demand-oriented approach, based on the lean value stream mapping and design. The final approach covers a mapping phase of the current state and a design phase of a future state. It follows the general principle of process optimization prior to digitalization. Being a highly visual method, it can be used to explain the needs and the motivation for the identified improvement initiatives to all involved parties, including non-IT-specialists. This paper also presents an exemplary result and several learnings from tests with three companies with discrete manufacturing processes.