Textile Learning Factory 4.0-Preparing Germany's Textile Industry for the Digital Future

Germany's Textile Industry with its hybrid and highly fragmented value chains is seen as both a future key supplier and adopter of digital operations technologies and Industry 4.0 solutions. Yet, companies hesitate to start their digital transformation process due to severe implementation barriers including uncertainties about financial benefits and the lack of specialist knowledge. In order to overcome these challenges and to help textile manufacturers to kick-start their digital transformation, we are setting up the Textile Learning Factory 4.0 at the Institut fur Textiltechnik der RWTH Aachen University in Aachen, Germany. The factory will become a central location to deliver capability building in a real-life demonstration and learning environment as well as a test base for piloting and scaling-up new digital solutions. Therefore, an end-to-end value chain from order to delivery for the manufacturing of smart, customer-specific textile products will be set up within the factory. The line will feature two development stages (Lean and Industry 4.0). In the Lean stage participants are going to learn how to systematically conduct a digital transformation while the Industry 4.0 stage will serve as a demonstrator featuring state-of-the-art digital solutions. In this paper, we want to present the initial motivation, the current status and the future prospects of the factory. (C) 2017 Published by Elsevier B.V.