Development of a Procedure Model for Human-Centered Industry 4.0 Projects

The digitization of industrial value chain, so-called "Industry 4.0", is one of the most important economic and social development in the last years. It allows the high-wage countries, for example Germany, to maintain their business responsiveness and competitiveness. While research and development units are organizationally, personally and methodically aligned for innovation projects development, the development and introduction of innovations in a manufacturing environment face a great challenge. The process is often unstructured and has an unclear target. Especially the procedure to introduce human-centered Industry 4.0 applications focuses not only on a technical side of the question. To solve this problem, a socio-technical approach should be taken under consideration. Furthermore, employees have to be involved in the design and implementation phase. This paper presents a new approach to establish a method to introduce human-centered cyber-physical use-cases to manufacturing. After the definition of procedure models, successful and less successful projects are analyzed. This is the base to define requirements for this presented approach. Therefore a modular innovation framework is developed, which includes a systematic procedure with project phases, results of each phase, a toolkit with methods and checklists. Additionally, work functions and role models are examined. Special emphasis is given to employee work engagement. At last, the usability of this procedure is discussed.