Collaboration Mechanisms to increase Productivity in the Context of Industrie 4.0

In retrospective industrial revolutions always lead to a significant increase in productivity. Thus, the question arises what mechanisms contribute to raise productivity in the current revolution "Industrie 4.0". Whereas the initial point of all past industrial revolutions can be located in the industry, they resulted in a tremendous change in society. In the present industrial revolution it is the other way around: Reviewing the beginning of the current transformation process, it is not driven by the production industry itself. Instead one of its main drivers is the invention of social networks and smart devices in combination with the employees' appealing to it. This development of interconnectivity pushes into the industrial sector today. For instance, there exists a desire of employees to bring their own device to work. According to a survey by Accenture 82 percent of the Chinese respondents would be "more resourceful" if they chose their own hardware and software for work. The first three revolutions had a strong focus on the shop-floor. This is also true for the present industrial revolution: The public view is merely on its impact on production processes. Therefore, this paper expands this view and additionally analyses the effects of the relating transformation processes to the indirect departments. The paper first analyses the enablers which mainly contribute to Industrie 4.0. Subsequently a reference systems is deduced which consists of basic collaboration mechanisms to increase productivity in the direct and indirect departments. A wide transparency and understanding of those collaboration mechanisms empower producing companies to profit from Industrie 4.0 by deriving individual activities which lead to a growth in productivity and therefore competitiveness. The specified approaches were conducted within the framework of the Cluster of Excellence "Integrative Production Technology for High-Wage Countries" of the RWTH Aachen University. (C) 2014 Elsevier B.V.