Manufacturing firms are increasingly adopting AI to improve inspection, maintenance, scheduling, robotics, digital twins, knowledge management, and supply chain coordination. However, these applications do not automatically create human-centered progress. Without deliberate organizational maturity, AI …

The skillsets of production workers are crucial for the effective adoption of smart technologies which are largely shaped by work design. However, current literature lacks comprehensive insights into the skills and work designs of production workers, hindering the adoption of Industry 5.0. Grounded in …

The transition to a circular economy presents significant challenges for high-tech manufacturing, particularly among small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), which often face resource constraints. Digital Product Passports (DPPs) have emerged as pivotal tools for enhancing transparency, traceability, …

Cold spray is an emerging technology that shows great promise for the repair of civil aircraft components. However, certification of such repairs requires a comprehensive evaluation of repair performance, including a detailed assessment of repair strength and the associated failure mechanisms. The present …

Collaborative robot arms (cobots) are gaining a strong foothold in contemporary manufacturing workplaces. While more information about the cobot’s impact becomes available, crucial design, work perception, performance, and strategic implications are systematically overlooked. Following a modern sociotechnical systems …

Small and medium-sized production companies face many challenges in decision making about planning, maintenance, and other operational processes due to challenges of high variety in customer demand, configurations of the production processes, technologies used and so on. Operation Digital Twinning is …

This research aims to offer insight into the perspectives of people from two distinct groups who are concerned about the international social-environmental practices of one company and affected through its factory work and impact on their living environment. One group is the activist citizen initiative, …

This paper describes some explorations on the concept of disassemblability as an important circularity indicator for products because of its severe impact on reuse value. Although usefulness of the concept for determining disassembly strategies and for improving circular product design clearly shows …

Slomp, J. and Gupta, J.N.D., Lean Planning & Control in a High-Variety/Low-Volume Environment, 2024, in Challenging the Future, Proceeding of the European Lean Educator Conference, ELEC 2023, ‘s-Hertogenbosch, The Netherlands, October 24–26, 2023, Editors Ton van Kollenburg, Alinda Kokkinou, and Olivia …

The aim of this research is to explore the potential of Mixed Reality (MR) technologies for Operator Support in order to progress towards Industry 4.0 (I4.0) particularly for SMEs. Through a series of interventions and interviews conducted with local SMEs, potential use cases and their drawbacks have …