Change.WorkAROUND

Overview

Increasing the adaptability of industrial service systems through workarounds (Change.WorkAROUND)

Adaptability describes a company’s ability to recognize changes that exceed an originally planned or predictable scope in a timely manner and to manage them both technically and organizationally. Establishing and strengthening adaptability requires its explicit integration into the corporate strategy. The funding initative “Industry 4.0 – Adaptability of Companies in Tomorrow's Value Creation (InWandel)” focuses on the sustainable interaction between people, organizational structures, and technology to explore new approaches for future value creation. The aim is to investigate solutions for successfully addressing dynamic challenges while making the best possible use of the potential and tools provided by Industry 4.0. For connected value creation, aspects related to organizational culture and structures, economic factors, and ecological considerations are taken into account holistically. An integrated perspective on production, services, and work is essential for developing interdisciplinary and application-oriented solutions.

Adaptable value creation processes emerge through workarounds

In high-tech industries, changes are often reflected in new customer needs as well as changing demand for products and services. Producers must therefore be able to quickly adapt existing value creation processes in order to provide tailored solutions for their customers. Workarounds, i.e., targeted deviations aimed at improving processes, represent an efficient means of responding quickly and successfully to new customer requirements. However, workarounds are currently rarely translated into process innovations because processes are often rigidly defined and dynamic adaptations are not supported. As a result, workarounds too rarely unfold their innovation potential beyond individual employees. In order to increase adaptability through workarounds, companies lack methods and tools to use these adaptation for the further development of their processes and to change in an agile and sustainable way.

This is the starting point of the ChangeWorkAROUND research project. The aim is to develop new methods and tools that enable industrial goods companies to identify and evaluate workarounds at an early stage and leverage them for sustainable change within structured change processes. If workarounds are detected early, they can be communicated within the company and used to further develop existing information systems, business processes, and organizational structures. A company's ability to change is improved by identifying changes in the market environment in a decentralized manner and systematically transforming them into successful new structures.

In particular, the project develops data-based methods for identifying and evaluating workarounds based on digital process data, methods for strategic contextualization and evaluation of agile process innovations, as well as methods for change and culture management within process organization. Three industrial companies apply these methods as part of a comprehensive process specifically tailored to their needs in order to systematically identify, analyze, and evaluate workarounds and use them as a basis for agile process innovations. Specifically, the project focuses on and prototypically improves the adaptability of smart services in Industry 4.0, gas cylinder logistics, and knowledge-intensive customer order processes in safety technology.

A structured approach to workarounds can improve the adaptability of value creation processes in many companies. Due to their modular structure, the developed methods and tools can be applied across all industries and complement established process management methods with agile process improvements. This enables companies to act more dynamically in the market and address specific customer needs more precisely than their competitors. At the same time, this secures employment and empowers skilled workers to actively participate in shapingtheir working environment.