Keynote speaker

Kai Furmans: Lean Manufacturing and Industry 4.0: Why we need mathematical models more than ever

Abstract

Operations Management in practice is frequently triggered by trends, like Lean Management or recently Industry 4.0. It seems, that these buzz-words are changing the way operations are managed fundamentally every time, a new trend comes up. However, while the technology which supports managing operations evolves over time, the underlying fundamentals are remaining the same. In the talk, the connections between the management tasks for an operation, the applicable technology and the underlying models are shown. By using some examples from the research of our institute we want to demonstrate the connections between these aspects and indicate interesting fields for further research.