Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

This chapter frames the developments described in this book and gives an overview of its structure. The background is provided with respect to the difficulties of introducing innovation on technical and organization level in well-established fields such as production industry. The nature of disruptiveness is explained in light of the applied subject-oriented modelling and execution approach. Thereby, disruptiveness motivates the process that guided the developments, both on the conceptual layer, and in practice, aiming to establish stakeholders as informed work place and process designers.

Recently, the German “Industry 4.0” initiative gained momentum, and sketches a vision for future production industries. This chapter reviews industrial challenges in the area of “Industry 4.0”. The findings are structured along the fundamental understanding of production companies as socio-technical systems. Socio-technical systems consist of three important aspects—(i) human, (ii) organizational structures and technology—and, most importantly their mutual relations, and thus, the interdependencies of these aspects. The review reveals that humans need to remain a vital element of future production and need to drive organizational development efforts and continuous workplace improvement. Organizational structures are challenged by changing business models of production companies. Enabling organizational change requires an open organizational culture (e.g., in terms of digital readiness), learning support and digital literacy of all involved stakeholders. In order to create value from Industry 4.0 developments, still technical challenges, in particular vertical and horizontal process integration need be resolved.

S-BPM targets Business Process Management and has been applied in various business domains to model business processes and implement workflow support. This chapter investigates S-BPM’s capabilities to support workplace and process design as well as process execution in production companies. Thereby, industrial capabilities of S-BPM are structured along the three dimensions of socio-technical systems which need to be considered for Industry 4.0 developments. Technological capabilities address the ability to integrate processes on different automation levels (planning, monitoring, real-time execution, etc.). Organizational capabilities discuss the potential of subject orientation for organizational development, and human capability development investigates how humans in production companies could be supported when involving them in workplace (re)design.

This case reports on an SME offering the production of atypical, unique and special-purpose machinery, equipment and technological complex units useful particularly in the automotive and electronic industries. The initial situation reveals challenges like the estimation of production times for one-time prototypes, lack of communication between shop floor workers and technologists, lack of information on upcoming production tasks for workplaces, low involvement of workers in decision processes, and lack of information on current state of production. The proposed subject-oriented solution targets to increase the worker autonomy, the worker involvement and information transparency as well as integration across all organizational control layers. In this respect, subject-orientation is applied to integrate real-time information from the shop floor (e.g. location information of parts, power consumption of machines) and business processes (e.g. customer order). A novel S-BPM modelling approach has been developed in the course of organizational design that seeks to model subjects as fine-grained behaviours of actors rather than functional roles. The revealed behaviours may be assigned to actors (i.e. humans, machines) depending on their capabilities and skills. This allows for dynamic allocation of tasks to humans and machines, process execution support based on skill levels, reflecting performed behaviours of actors and (de-)constructing organizational behaviours. The evaluation is composed of formative and summative elements. The formative evaluation reports on findings based on developer workshops, focus groups and user tests that were conducted in parallel to the design and implementation to ensure a user-centred approach. The summative evaluation reports on findings related to the outcome of the case implementations at the SME.

This case reports on a worldwide operating SME producing floor cleaning machines. The SME distinguishes itself from its competitors by providing highly customizable high-quality products. Employees are one of the “most-valuable resources” to the management. However, the initial situation reveals significant improvement opportunities related to the employee involvement and empowerment concerning workplace re-design. The proposed subject-oriented solution aims to involve shop floor workers in workplace (re-)design by providing them structural empowerment means such as social media for suggestion proposals, discussions and negotiations. Furthermore, the newly introduced features are designed to allow for context-sensitive reporting of suggestions and errors. Context-sensitive elicitation provides the basis for analysing impacts of changes (e.g. the affected location or worker) and visualizing potential improvement areas within the shop floor. The generic suggestion and error handling process can be tailored to different organizations. The S-BPM process handling has been integrated with a semantic wiki allowing for context-sensitive workplace improvement elicitation and change propagation analysis. The evaluation reports on findings in developer workshops, focus groups and user tests conducted in parallel to the design and implementation to ensure a user-centred approach (formative part), and on findings related to the outcome of the case implementations at the given SME (summative part).

In factories of the future, the worker and his or her well-being is regarded a crucial part of manufacturing situations. Human factors are recognized as vital to achieve sustainable organizational success. Advances in the area of wearable sensors proclaim that sensing human properties within manufacturing settings is technically feasible. Thereby, sensing human properties, such as the level of comfort or stress, may be used to adapt system behaviour in manufacturing situations. This chapter revisits related work from adaptive systems design addressing triggers for adaptations and impacted dimensions. The related work can be considered as design space for developers of S-BPM-based adaptive processes. In line with the related work, a laboratory setting at the Johannes Kepler University Linz has been designed and utilized for testing sensor-based process behaviour and control. Essential findings are described with respect to system architectures and S-BPM process design. The chapter concludes with relating modelling adaptive to human-aware S-BPM processes on a concept layer, and future work.

This chapter reports on learnings gained from the industrial cases (Chaps. and ) and on a more general level on learnings related to sensing. Doing so, the generic steps and stakeholders involved within the two different cases are described and for each activity bundle respective learnings are reported. Aside from the procedural reflection, learnings from the regional consulting partners within the cases are described on a general level. In addition to the case learnings, learnings with respect to sensing human and machine properties are reported. As such the chapter is intended to inform practitioners about crucial aspects to be considered, lessons learnt in the different activities of the cases and suitable method support or enrichment regarding the different S-BPM activities.

This chapter discusses the possible future of using S-BPM in production industry, including prospective obstacles and potential opportunities. It commences by proposing a framework representing the fundamental values of S-BPM relevant for its contribution to production enterprises: agility. These values are derived from the agile approach to software development. It is shown how S-BPM supports them in several ways; specifically

The principal obstacles are identified for the use of S-BPM in industrial practice, in a way to achieve the four agile values. They include a widespread perception of process modelling as a routine task (not a creative activity), security concerns for core production processes, organizational cultures where there is a strong sense of hierarchy and silo mentality, and a desire for global control flow. Based on the size of each obstacle and the degree to which S-BPM is already prepared to address them, the beginnings of a roadmap towards industrial fitness are then developed. For this purpose, the metaphor of a “compass” is introduced to give orientation to future S-BPM research within a four-dimensional space of opportunities. A specific S-BPM project in the food industry, as part of the SO-PC-Pro project, is presented to show common drivers and challenges of S-BPM implementations for production processes within this four-dimensional space. Finally, the compass is used for identifying further domains that share similar issues likely to be solved using an agile approach supported by S-BPM. The architecture-engineering-construction (AEC) domain is presented as an example of such a domain.