Employee qualification by digital learning games

Global competition and individual customer requirements generate challenges for manufacturing companies. To cope with these challenges, companies require an increased level of flexibility. In the first place, this flexibility has to be provided by the employees, as they are one of the key success factors for mastering change. An essential prerequisite for this is a high level of employee qualification across all areas of the company. The learning factories approach has garnered particular attention in recent years as a playful and efficient way of learning the principles and methods of processes improvement. The drawbacks of this method include the limited, non-holistic perspective of each trainee as well as the non-recurring knowledge transfer. Moreover, this kind of qualification requires the trainees to be in the same place at the same time. These downsides can be successfully countered by supplementing learning factories with a digital learning component depicting the learning environment, as digital learning will enable individual learning routes for all trainees and is accessible at all times and all places. This paper serves to outline the idea of serious learning by using digital learning games along with the attendant benefits. Over and beyond this, it also presents a digital learning game for teaching specific lean production methods. (C) 2017 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.