Digital Lean Production - An Approach to Identify Potentials for the Migration to a Digitalized Production System in SMEs from a Lean Perspective

In times of rising product variants, individualization and demand for flexibility, manufacturing companies are forced to meet economic target values to stay competitive within volatile markets. In order to accomplish these targets, companies implement the principles of lean production to ensure efficient and productive manufacturing processes. As the lean production philosophy is based on synchronization and standardization, currently it is stretched to its limits due to its lack of required flexibility in manufacturing processes and ability to cope with the complexity caused by variants and individualization. Digitization offers the possibility to extend the ability of lean production systems in order to adapt manufacturing processes with respect to the requirements resulting from challenging markets. This paper demonstrates the state of the art regarding lean production as wells as digitization and presents an approach based on the consistent opinion of reviewed literature, which formulates digitization as the next step of lean management in production systems. This study reveals the demand for a methodological approach in a SME environment that quantifies the profitability of the implementation of digital technologies in lean production systems. Based on this study a model for the identification of relevant technologies is suggested and the scope of further research is derived.