Proceedings of the 10^th International Conference on Operations and Supply Chain Management, 2020

Jamila Alieva
Gavle University

Daryl Powell
SINTEF Manufacturing AS

Manufacturing companies are urged to digitalize various production and management processes to stay innovative and competitive. As such, shop-floor employees in production plants are typically the first to face the challenge of digitalization. The topic of employees’ role in the age of Industry 4.0 has been discussed in the literature, raising concerns that people will be replaced by the technologies offered by the fourth industrial revolution. More recently, digitalization studies have proposed the successful combination of work between man and machine in manufacturing plants. The lean management literature also discusses people as the main asset of manufacturing firms, where employees are the key driver for changes and improvements. However, there is a lack of discussion regarding the employees going through the digital transformation process themselves, and why some processes have been more successful than others. This study aims to evaluate a model from soft lean management practices and soft total quality management practices for digital transformation in Norwegian manufacturing companies. Furthermore, this study aims to evaluate the behaviours of employees from different management levels in the digital transformation process.

[Download Full Paper] [Bibtex]

The persistent DOI of this article will be available soon .