Development of a Toolbox for Engineering in Project Teams for Industrie 4.0

Cyber physical systems offer a vast variety of new possibilities in the context of the fourth industrial revolution, ‘Industrie 4.0’. Due to an increasing amount of more complex requirements for companies and the necessity of an implementation guideline of Industrie 4.0 technologies, a new approach for supporting small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) was developed: the 'Generic Procedure Model to Introduce Industrie 4.0' (GPMI4.0). Fields of action, adapted to their own enterprise, are identified to reach a higher level of Industrie 4.0. GPMI4.0s core method is the Industrie 4.0 toolbox which is divided in five phases: preparation, analysis, idea generation, validation and implementation. Toolboxes for the domain product, production, intralogistics, IT security and assembly are already published. However, in order to use technologies of Industrie 4.0 in more stages of the product life cycle, GPMI4.0 has to be applied to the not yet considered domain of engineering. This paper focuses on the development of a Toolbox for the domain of engineering regarding Industrie 4.0, analysing the product development process from the product idea to the manufacturing process. Using the Toolbox, the enterprises are able to analyse their engineering in the context of Industrie 4.0 and develop solutions to reach a higher level. The purpose of the engineering Toolbox is to generate an engineering competence profile by classifying the development state of every application level of an enterprise. Based on the profile the engineering Toolbox is used to advance the enterprise engineering competence regarding Industrie 4.0. The benefits are optimized inputs for the production field that can be used for the digital supply chain and for generating new business models. Finally, the suitability of the engineering Toolbox is validated by different companies and projects