Design Approach for a Learning Factory to train Services

The automation of warehouse processes, the increased complexity due to e-commerce and the development towards paperless warehousing are one of the severe challenges the logistics industry is currently facing. Due to changing markets new service opportunities have opened up, thus to stay competitive innovative services are vital. Various service products are offered by intralogistics system providers to assist customers but the lack of understanding the services and the costs involved, causes customers to refuse acceptance of the services. Therefore, content of new services needs to be trained and awareness for service innovations need to be built which offers the opportunity to increase customer satisfaction and further develop customer relationships. The demand for practice-oriented training and education of customers is key to master upcoming challenges of warehousing facilities. This paper intents to develop a learning factory for services that promise 1) customers a better operation of their warehouses by correct use of services; 2) innovation opportunities for the service provider; and 3) further research opportunities between industry and academia. For this reason, in the first phase existing learning factories and services of an intralogistics company have been analyzed. Based on that service-learning factory concepts have been developed. In a third phase, a concept was chosen, further detailed and training contents were created. Based on this concept a prototype was built at the LEAD Factory of Graz University of Technology and tested.