Kaizen 4.0 Towards an Integrated Framework for the Lean-Industry 4.0 Transformation

Abstract

Due to increasing competitive pressure, growing customer demands and rising desire for individuality in the product design, companies face rising demands on the efficiency of their production systems. This challenges the alignment of established philosophies such as Lean and Industry 4.0 and requires respective strategy derivations to be translated in concrete concepts, methods and technology projects on an operative level. Building on the work of Spath et al. 2017 and Schuh et al. 2017, a model based approach is presented which contributes to a reduction of complexity in challenging decision-making at transformations from Lean to Digitization and Industry 4.0. Perspectives given by the development of a maturity model allow considerations of the overall system and target configuration for both local and temporal decisions. This leads to an integrated view of Lean and Industry 4.0 as complementary paradigms ranging from a strategic to an operational level. As the complexity of the developed framework rises with the number of considered concepts, methods and technologies as well as the target configuration, an examination of further complexity-reducing methods needs to be performed. Our approach sheds light on how interrelations between Lean Production and Industry 4.0 occur when considering an evolutionary transformation. Furthermore, it shows how companies can evaluate concepts, methods and technologies on an operative level to develop their production systems in the context of Lean and Industry 4.0. Moreover, our model offers proceedings to develop their Lean Production systems in the context of Industry 4.0.