Different competence areas of workers in combination with technical assistance as an enabler for mass personalization products

From simple products, often mechanical and electronic products, products are becoming more and more complicated and complex due to individualization and personalization and an increasing degree of cross-linking. In the future, customer-specific products will be developed together with the customer (co-design process). Due to the number of variants which can no longer be determined in advance, further challenges arise, e.g. ensuring the quality of all variants of a product. Also, a repeat order for the same or similar products will not occur often. This requires new methods and practices of how employees can produce individualized and personalized products economically. For this purpose, various areas of competence of the employees, within the four life cycles meeting in production, i.e. order, product, factory, and technology life cycles, are to be measured, extended and interlinked. This aims at enabling employees to generate new and economic ways to solve given problems on their own. Thus, work contents can be targeted to suitable workers to perform this work assigned to them and develop competencies at the same time. Such an approach is presented in this paper. First parts of the approach were implemented in the learning factory aIE of the University of Stuttgart.