Smartwatch Integration in Digital Supply Chains

Abstract

As the maturity of digital integrated supply chains grows, the amount of operations which are tracked or which are directly controlled by a computerised system has seen a rapid increase with the emergence of the Industry 4.0 paradigm. This is notably desired in high-cost countries where having an overview on the supply chain is crucial in ensuring the delivery dependability for the customer. However, the manual tasks are overlooked to a certain extent. Most digitalisation initiatives have the worker interact manually with the manufacturing execution systems (MES) using terminals placed around the shop floor. Two scenarios in which the worker has to interact with a MES are given in this paper and a digital solution is proposed to solve the implied shortcomings concerning the interface between production planning and shop-floor production. A solution comes under the form of an open-source, freely available smartwatch app designed to be used by the workers for fast and easy interaction with the MES and enterprise resource planning system while at the same time serving as a task deployment method. The solution proposal is aligned with extant initiatives of obtaining end-to-end supply chain digitalisation while enabling the worker’s fast responsiveness upon task deployment.