Implementing Smart Production Through Lean Digitalization

In today’s globalized market, value creation usually includes many companies in different locations contributing to manufacturing, transporting, storing, and distributing components and products. Having several participants along the value chain leads to an increased complexity of the whole production process and requires high coordination effort. A high transparency of the relevant processes requires (real-time) data on the production and distribution processes, the availability of resources, the customers’ needs, etc. to be acquired, stored, processed, evaluated and the results being provided at the necessary places. However, in many companies, digitalization is realized as a gradual process without having a holistic view on the processes. The digitalization of companies and the whole supply chain share similar priorities like efficiency gain and waste reduction with the Lean concept. For an efficient and effective data acquisition, we create an assessment logic for making the targets measurable and evaluating implementation possibilities, thereby following the lean principles: We provide methods for the operationalisation of operational performance indicators and provide a methodology to evaluate the expedient choice and realization of data acquisition-specific lean practices to achieve the identified goals. The approach allows to prioritize and implement ways for lean data acquisition as enabler for supply chain digitalization.