The year 2015 is coming to an end and once again I can't shake the impression that certain terms are being touted as a panacea every year. One of the most frequently mentioned buzzwords in 2015 in the manufacturing industry was "Industrie 4.0". Behind this lies nothing other than the impact of the third wave, the information culture, on the process world of manufacturing industry.
Everything is interconnected, all products find their way through the complex production world and eventually to the customer through a defined algorithm. At the center of these efforts are the efficient use of resources and time as well as cost optimization. Even the apparent contradictions to previous "panaceas", such as the approach of "Lean methodology", are often controversially discussed. However, just like "Lean", a term that actually originated from a misunderstanding by three MIT scientists, is also
Industrie 4.0 another contribution to the disenfranchisement of humans and their ability to think and act.
For many decades, it has been observed that often technical solutions, especially IT developments, have become self-serving. Certain ideas and measures that promise an improvement in terms of customers and/or employees are not implemented because existing infrastructures cannot support them or the cost of teaching them the necessary skills is too high. However, since the systems were purchased at great expense and must be efficiently utilized, there is often no way around it. The result is that good ideas fail. Employees who had these ideas become demotivated and eventually left behind. They are then often mistakenly identified as so-called "underperformers" and, if possible, "disposed of". The reason why despite these disastrous consequences, leaders persist in sticking to certain methods and technologies lies in the fear of entrepreneurial decisions. Leaders in many companies have lost the ability to think independently or are afraid to make decisions that fall outside the predefined and sometimes antiquated metric-based framework. Because such suggestions are usually not politically viable or require significant effort to implement, and disrupt the perceived control of the overall system, which is reduced to a more or less large number of metrics. And this is exactly where the hype around Industrie 4.0 comes in. A complete control of an overall system consisting of many individual substructures is promised. All levels of management have direct access to the automatically generated numbers, data, and facts at all times. This suggests a supposed control, on the basis of which a variety of brilliant reports can be created again. Yet this control is a fallacy, as the real world has little in common with many of these numbers, which are sometimes interpreted and filtered in a goal-oriented manner. The Lean methods have also been similarly misunderstood. Reducing Lean to a methodology is a similarly big misunderstanding, as decision-makers are not required to think entrepreneurially here either. Everything is worked out as a pure methodology that must be "implemented" in a clearly defined manner.
Even with Lean, many metrics are used to suggest a supposed control.
Even if some now talk about culture in the context of Lean, the resulting conclusions are again purely methodical and thus not what it should be: an entrepreneurial, responsible corporate culture in which the entire company is developed in the long term together with all stakeholders. [Dr. Mario Buchinger] Profile: http://www.trainers-excellence.de/redner/mario-buchinger.html
