Analyzing socio-technical risks in implementation of Industry 4.0-use cases

Industry 4.0-use Cases offer many benefits. However, companies often hesitate to implement Industry 4.0-use cases due to uncertain risks. The risk management process enables the controlling of potential risks. In addition to technological risks, risks relating to employees and the organization are also significant in order to implement Industry 4.0-use cases successfully. Therefore, a holistic socio-technical risk management approach is required to address the dimensions of human, organization and technology equally and to take their interactions with each other into account. Especially in the first step of the risk management process (risk identification and analysis), a holistic approach is required to ensure a complete knowledge basis which is essential for the subsequent steps of the risk management process. However, existing risk management approaches are usually restricted to risk management in single domains. For example, they primarily focus on either technical, financial or personnel risks. In order to address the mentioned challenges, this paper presents a framework to analyze socio-technical risks in implementation of Industry 4.0-use cases. The development of the framework is based on a literature analysis in order to identify socio-technical risks and related risk categories. From the totality of these risk categories, 11 risk fields have been derived. For each of the risk fields, a list of characteristic risks has been compiled. In order to support a holistic socio-technical risk identification and analysis for the implementation of Industry 4.0-use cases, this paper presents a corresponding procedure model to use the framework in industrial practice. The procedure model enables a check of the completeness of identified risks and enables a further analysis of the identified risks by combining the framework with existing risk management methods. The validation of the framework and the corresponding procedure model is presented by using an example from industrial practice.