Capacity Building Through Research

The dire shortage of skilled workers does not stop short of industry. From onboarding and knowledge retention to assistance systems – production engineering must deliver solutions.

Production technology is a highly application-oriented field. After all, its questions focus on how the products that we interact with every day are made. As a result, the researchers at the Production Technology Center (PTZ) Berlin are always in very close touch with the needs of industry. One of the pain points that is repeatedly being raised is the shortage of skilled workers, which presents manufacturing companies with very specific challenges. They see Germany as a production location under threat if they cannot secure their production capacities with a sufficiently qualified workforce.

When filling vacancies, they are often no longer able to apply the same standards in terms of educational background or prior experience as they did at a time when the shortage of skilled workers was not as pressing and there were hundreds of applications for a single open position. This also increases the requirements for onboarding and continuous support of their employees. Language barriers can make the process even more difficult. On the other hand, the »baby boomer« generation is retiring – and with it many experienced colleagues. A coherent knowledge management strategy as well as user-friendly assistance and management tools are essential in order to retain the wealth of knowledge they have built up over the years and make it accessible to future generations. 

© Fraunhofer IPK/Larissa Klassen

Companies will also have to increase their attractiveness to compete for qualified professionals. Young people today have high expectations towards their potential employer. They want them to embrace credible values that are in line with their own, and they expect these values to be reflected in day-to-day business processes. They desire flexibility and agility, expressed in the form of New Work, but also through the intelligent use of technologies such as AI or virtual reality. And they demand career development opportunities, including in the form of sound continuing education concepts. 

From corporate management to product development and application on the shop floor and beyond, the research scientists at Fraunhofer IPK and IWF at TU Berlin are developing solutions that help their industry partners to meet these demands. 

© Fraunhofer IPK/Larissa Klassen

Knowledge is key 

Knowledge management is a task that confronts many companies with major challenges. It is a process that requires us to thoroughly take inventory first in order to design an intelligent strategy in line with the company’s goals and given legal requirements. In order to be implemented, it must also be easy for employees to carry out and integrate into their day-to-day working routines. The experts at PTZ Berlin support all these steps with numerous methods and tools that tackle different levels: from the coordination between individual departments to the corporate level to entire nationwide science and innovation systems. 

At the department level, coordination and flow of information between individual company units are particularly difficult challenges in knowledge management. The many different means of gathering knowledge and various types of information, as well as missing interfaces and processes occasionally present management with a Babylonian language labyrinth. With the help of methods developed at Fraunhofer IPK, management teams can bring order to this chaos: Knowledge graphs help to make decisions and their effects along the process chain easier to trace, preventing unexpected costs and spending additional resources. Immersive extended reality methods can also be used to strengthen cross-unit collaboration by enriching data and translating it into jointly editable virtual models.

At the level of individual organizations, right down to small and medium-sized enterprises, there is great demand for scientifically proven concepts and methods in knowledge management. At Fraunhofer IPK, these are strategically and operationally interlinked, as has recently been required by standards such as ISO 30401 and DIN SPEC 91443. In order to guarantee compliance, researchers are feeding the relevant specifications directly into the functioning of the respective management and assistance systems, together with the requirements and specifications on the output of the respective process. By doing so, the users of these solutions can be sure that all legal regulations and quality requirements are met if applied correctly.

Fraunhofer IPK scientists are also supporting the implementation of knowledge management concepts at a national level: on behalf of the Brazilian industry training service SENAI, they developed guidelines and a toolbox. These enable the now almost 30 innovation institutes, whose establishment the team also planned and supported, to develop individually tailored concepts for knowledge management and implement them along certain milestones.

Human-centered production assistance

Focusing on the individual, it becomes clear how well-designed knowledge management and assistance systems can support employees throughout their entire career. Already during onboarding, it can be extremely helpful for everyone involved to not always have to reinvent the wheel. The introduction to the tasks of a new job can be technologically supported with the help of a tool that can draw on the company’s accumulated wealth of knowledge, giving new employees a sense of security and reducing the burden of time-consuming handovers for more experienced colleagues. 

© Fraunhofer IPK/Larissa Klassen

New employees or even temporary workers can quickly find their way around new tasks with the help of these assistance systems. Web-based apps with straightforward, image-based step-by-step instructions, such as those being developed at Fraunhofer IPK, even make it possible to overcome language barriers and integrate employees with different levels of qualification. 

Researchers at IWF at TU Berlin are also developing AI-based methods that compile a company’s wealth of knowledge into a self-hosted large language model and make it accessible to employees in the form of an intuitive chatbot – a digital helpdesk of sorts! Fraunhofer IPK scientists are working closely with the IWF team to investigate how this type of knowledge management can be strategically embedded and implemented in companies. 

Fraunhofer IPK researchers and their partners are also developing innovative approaches to continuing education and training. For instance, a platform that generates adaptive learning paths for individual employees with the help of AI is being developed, considering the latest learning methods and developments on the continuing education market. The platform takes into account operational requirements specifying certain target profiles, as well as employees’ personal preferences, learning goals and skill levels. Fraunhofer IPK experts are supporting the introduction of the learning platform with workshops on holistic operational transformation and skills development strategies. In another project, Fraunhofer IPK scientists developed a training program for the integration of sustainability in manufacturing companies that uses serious games to promote effective learning. It enables individuals to make informed decisions, implement relevant technologies and develop integrated sustainability strategies.

© Fraunhofer IPK/Larissa Klassen
© Fraunhofer IPK/Larissa Klassen
© Fraunhofer IPK/Larissa Klassen

Assistance on the shop floor

At the level of manufacturing processes, we can primarily distinguish between direct and indirect assistance. Indirect assistance operates in the background, while direct assistance involves direct human-machine interaction. Direct assistance therefore primarily supports workers on the shop floor directly in performing their tasks. This can for example include the mentioned web-based app with practical guidance, which is equally suitable for numerous applications beyond onboarding. It can also be used for maintenance, repair and overhaul or setting up machine tools, for instance.

Virtual and augmented reality technologies can be helpful tools, providing an interface between humans and machines in direct assistance. In combination with digital twins, for example, they enable the simple manipulation of data and models, which can then in turn be transferred to a real object. In order to function properly in an industrial business context, these technologies require a high degree of data consistency. Up until now, changes to a production step have generally been made manually. For a new variant, for example, a modified process description is sent to the worker, or a modified program is loaded into the machine control system. This can result in inconsistent situations, for example due to retroactive adjustments. An interdisciplinary team at Fraunhofer IPK is striving for consistency from product development to live instruction and machine control in order to ensure that all involved stakeholders are updated at the touch of a button. An ambitious research project with numerous partners aims to make digitally integrated assistance possible this way. Digitalization and data consistency along the process chain are being tested here, exemplified by an intelligent, human-centered assistance system that uses AR and VR methods to support fastening applications in automotive production.

Another example of very direct assistance is the use of physically supportive soft robotics solutions, which are also being researched at Fraunhofer IPK. As such, the exoskeleton PowerGrasp has been developed further to not only provide strength support, but also recognize movement intentions and even states of fatigue. 

Indirect forms of assistance, on the other hand, are essentially decision-making aids based on data analysis. These are used, for example, in quality assurance, where sensor-supported technologies relieve employees of monotonous and strenuous tasks. Evaluation of sensor data can also provide them with a reliable data basis for difficult decision-making situations. For instance, scientists at Fraunhofer IPK can enable their partners to carry out in-situ monitoring of additive processes. They are also finding innovative solutions for working with challenging materials and processes. One such application is a combined welding process for working with aluminum in the production of housings for electric motors and batteries. In this complex process, the aim is to prevent the formation of pores or adhesion defects. Research scientists at Fraunhofer IPK have thus invented a type of intelligent co-pilot that uses AI and sensor technology to warn of potential errors in the production process.