Colloquia

Summary

Manufacturing companies are met with a variety of challenges that require them to produce more flexible, efficient, fast, and reliably. While this can in part be realised through improving their current manufacturing methods, this is likely not enough. To address these challenges, manufacturers must towards a ‘smarter’ production environment. The main component of such a smart production environment is an increased level of digitalisation. Research on how such digitalisation can provide value to a company is often too broad or too specific. Furthermore, much of it is tailored to MNEs while SMEs face similar challenges. The aims of this thesis are therefore to identify how manufacturing SMEs can create value through digitalisation of their manufacturing environment and how this value, once realised, can be maintained. The potential value of an increasingly digitalised manufacturing environment was examined by analysing the concept of Industry 4.0. Next, the concepts of the digital twin and digital twinning were discussed to assess how this potential value of can be captured. Lastly, the barriers that might prevent manufacturing  SMEs from capturing this value were discussed and translated into technological and organisational considerations for such companies. Based on the findings of this analysis, the necessary support for manufacturing SMEs to develop their digital twinning capabilities was defined. The first part of this support was an approach to translate the motivators for a company to introduce digital twinning, into the functionalities that were required of a digital twinning application. This was further distilled into the information need and its expected use both now and in the future. By making this distinction, the approach aided in the formulation of a roadmap for the application’s further development. The second part of the support was a tool to keep track of the information captured in the different roadmaps resulting from iterations of the designed approach. This tool enables an aggregated view of how the different applications and their components relate to each other. The tool thus allows a manufacturing SME to examine and analyse the overall digital twinning landscape of the company. This captured knowledge base can then be used for decision-making regarding digital twinning within the organisation. Both the approach and tool were verified and validated through various case studies.