Paths to a crisis-proof industry

The term resilience has been on everyone's lips since the COVID-19 pandemic - especially with regard to the future design of industry. "If we want to prepare our companies for future crises, we need to rethink current models of action and explanations for processes within the machine, the factory, but also entire supply chains," warns Prof. Robert Schmitt, Member of the Board of Directors of the Machine Tool Laboratory WZL at RWTH Aachen University on the occasion of the spring conference of the WGP (Scientific Society for Production Engineering) on May 5 and 6, 2021.

And we need to find ways to leverage the potential of our technological expertise. With ReSyst, the Fraunhofer Institutes in the Production Group have already made great strides in the area of resilience. "This is where the WGP comes in and will present a concrete framework for action that will enable small and medium-sized companies in particular to better deal with crises and survive in a volatile international market," says Schmitt, who is also the spokesperson for the WGP working group on resilience. "We plan to publish it at the end of this year."

Disruptive events such as the pandemic will occur more frequently in the future, whether due to dwindling raw materials, climate crises or trade wars. This makes it all the more important to focus on resilient production. But what does resilient production actually mean, asked the WGP professors at the spring conference, which was once again held online.

Everything revolves around the black swan

"We can't call for more resilient production in the future without defining what exactly that means," explains Schmitt. "Resilience is not a 'nicer' term for flexibility or robustness. It includes these, but is more than that." The term is not used uniformly even within the engineering sciences. At the conference, the WGP professors therefore defined the term as the ability of a (production) system to maintain its value-adding and economic operability in the face of disruptions or at least to quickly ramp it back up to a minimum after a disruption. "In short, it is the ability to deal with what Nassim Taleb calls a 'black swan', i.e. rare and unforeseen, seemingly surprising events. They should have little or no impact on a resilient company," says Schmitt. However, it is not enough to restore the functionality of the system. The latter must also be adapted to the changed environment. "The question arises as to where we define the limits of the system. For example, are we looking at a machine, a process chain or the entire in-house production? Will the entire supply chain and potential networks also be included?"

It won't work without further digitalization

Of course, the new theoretical approaches must also be implemented technologically. WGP has been working on various solutions in this area for many years. Digitized production planning and control is one of them, while the biological transformation of production technologies is another. In the latter, for example, the systems learn self-organization, as is natural in nature, in order to deal with the "plasticity of life". In terms of production, this would mean switching smoothly between smaller and larger batch sizes depending on external circumstances or using resources as required and to a minimum. Successful companies are already demonstrating how energy can be procured or distributed flexibly with regard to a production plant or an entire factory.

However, none of this will be possible without leveraging the potential of artificial intelligence and learning systems. "With the help of digital twins that cast their digital shadows in relation to applications, we can establish more, different and better prevention strategies. We want to use the digital shadows to predict events by playing them out in the digital world and finding out how we can control them in reality."

Independence from external influences can also be achieved by not only expanding production knowledge through the use of suitable process data, but also by decentralizing it. "We need cross-divisional and cross-company structures with high data availability in the emerging data rooms," warns Schmitt. "Collaboration will be much more important in the future."

People remain the decisive factor

Digital shadows, artificial intelligence and trustworthy data infrastructures are prerequisites, but not the sole guarantors of production that adapts to external conditions. "The factor that connects everything is and remains people," states the Aachen-based production engineer. "Employees must be trained so that they can react competently to sudden changes. This means, for example, that they must not only be able to do their job at the machine, but also contribute to making the 'industrial' system safer. This in turn means that they need support for higher-level actions that go beyond the operational, local activities of their day-to-day work. For example, irregularities in individual processes can be detected earlier if employees feel responsible for upstream and downstream process steps."

For companies or organizations, this equates to flatter hierarchies. People at the machine will take on more responsibility for decisions and managers will increasingly work as coaches. "Our publication will therefore not only focus on the technological foundations, but also on interdependencies and the network concept," says Schmitt. "We will highlight strategies that will enable them to remain fit for the future, even in the face of events such as the current pandemic."