abstract
- The University of Alberta and the Tecnológico de Monterrey are working together on creating a common learning platform for the education and training of small manufacturing business owners and their workforce in smart manufacturing technologies and renewed production management approaches for the digitalization and smartification of their shop floors in the Industry 4.0 era. The ¿PiTech Academy¿ learning platform aims to support a human-centric digital transformation of small manufacturing businesses by developing the required digital skills in their current and future workforce. Its focus is on developing the basic skillset of an ¿Engineer 4.0¿ in shop floor workers and engineering students, so they can start mastering the skills needed for the successful deployment of smart manufacturing technologies in combination with refreshed production management approaches such as ¿Digital Lean Manufacturing¿, which are making their come back into the emerging Lean 4.0 shop floors and learning factories. The ¿PiTech Academy¿ curriculum has been meticulously designed to accommodate small manufacturing businesses¿ unique technological needs and financial and human resources constraints and validated in a comprehensive two-day hands-on workshop at the University of Alberta. The workshop brought small manufacturing business managers and their shop floor workers to engage with engineering students to learn how to use different smart manufacturing technologies, namely: Additive Manufacturing, the Internet of Things (IoT), and Collaborative Robotics ¿ to digitally enhance and/or smartify their production operations. Feedback from the workshop participants was gathered through a survey to evaluate their learning. They reported increased knowledge acquisition, improved decision-making, and enhanced organisational collaboration in support of their self and workplace digital transformation journey. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024.