What motivates an entrepreneur to change the core of his young business, even though it is just starting out as an innovative consulting specialist for digital, modern production? Why does a young, healthy consulting company put its first profits into a software product, even though it has successfully completed pilot projects in leading plants of the largest German companies for digitization and Industry 4.0?
You can find the answer in the scientific foundation of IPS Engineers and the „Limits of Lean”.

The successful establishment of a consulting company which is as highly specialised as IPS Engineers is requires several things. In addition to the strong will to shape an innovative company according to own ideas, expertise in the relevant field is of the utmost importance. When IPS Engineers was founded as a Spin-Off of the Institute for Production Systems (IPS) of the TU Dortmund University in September 2017, it was precisely this expertise that formed the basis. CEO Julian Schallow, together with the institute’s professor and current shareholder Prof. Dr. Jochen Deuse, decided to bring the decade-long scientific research on “Digital Factory” to the real production sites. The core of this research is to support the industrial engineer with modern technologies in the best possible way.

„The core of the research in the area of „Digital Factory“ is to support the industrial engineer with modern technologies in the best possible way.“

From the very beginning, IPS Engineers has not been active in the classic consulting business. Pilot projects directly out of research, the implementation of competences from different research areas in the field of Industrial Data Science as well as Digital Manufacturing in the largest German companies have been IPS Engineers’ main field. The combination of the classic consulting toolbox and their great expertise in current and future relevant topics formed the recipe for success.

Within these activities, the focus was particularly on „Advanced Lean Production“. This topic has a great influence on the future of industry, as the classic lean methods have reached their limits.
Research and active business brought IPS Engineers to a point where the application of classic lean methods in modern, variable production with a high number of variants did not achieve optimum results at a reasonable cost. Yesterday’s value stream analysis is worth nothing in an electronics factory of tomorrow.

“Yesterday’s value stream analysis is worth nothing in an electronics factory of tomorrow.”

The isolated analysis of a product group is not target-oriented in almost every modern company. The high manual effort required for this is not worth it to get only a „snapshot“ of the dynamic processes. This realization brought the management of IPS Engineers to a point of restructuring the business. The further development of Lean Production in the course of digitalization holds great potential. Based on research into Dynamic Value Stream Analysis (DWSA/DVSA), the „TWINCULATORS“ software was developed, which gives you a deep insight into your processes in real time without having to be on site. This enables a completely new view of production, which makes classic value stream analysis superfluous. Learn more about how you can overview and control your production in a completely transparent way.

www.twinculators.com