Smart Domain: Smart Manufacturing

This paper explores how layout strategies influence/is influenced by HR strategies for digital operations. Connecting HR strategies with workspace location and layout choices is important in today’s digital era. Physical and digital workspace design affects employee performance, teamwork, and overall organizational efficiency. Effective location planning looks at talent availability and costs and aligns these with the company’s digital transformation goals, making sure that the right talent is in the best places to support digital operations, which is the new norm (Talent Neuron, 2023). Gartner (Gartner (2021, April 7) highlights the changes in location planning after the pandemic, emphasizing the need for flexible, remote work options. This shift has seen many organizations redesigning their workspaces to support hybrid work, influencing HR’s focus on engagement and productivity. Organizations, especially those running global operations should consider practical HR strategies to position talent in various locations which will enhance digital abilities and operational efficiency. With the rise of digital technology and its influence on traditional business models, new digital technologies call for reimagined workspaces that boost collaboration and creativity, which influences HR strategies around talent management and engagement. Muttaqin, I., Setiadi , B., & Irpan, M. (2024) states that digitalization in HRM enhances competitiveness by modernizing functions and requiring new digital skills. This study emphasizes the need for HR professionals to adopt technology and create strategies to boost productivity. Success depends on aligning skills with tech advancements and involving key stakeholders. Baber, P. (2024) performed a study which found that AI-driven job autonomy and digital learning orientation enhance digital employee engagement, though work meaningfulness did not mediate this effect. Employees sometimes felt lonely and insecure using digital tools, suggesting organizations should focus on promoting autonomy and learning to improve engagement. Overall, location and layout strategies support digital operations through effective talent placement and workspace design, improving company performance. Meanwhile, HR’s focus on digital operations drives the need for innovative layouts for remote and hybrid work, promoting a more adaptable company structure.

Inventory management manages stock movement and ensures that there is economic and logistic justification of such action as these actions significantly impact the financial performance of an organisation (Czarny, 2024). The primary goal of inventory management is to meet demand while sustaining minimal loss in profit, avoiding overstock of unsold goods while preventing shortages (Koren, Perlman, & Shnaiderman, 2023). Inventory management entails knowing the various types of inventory strategies available and utilizing the most suitable (Czarny, 2024). A relevant production strategy is the “Just In Time” (JIT) methodology which emphasises the importance of maintaining low inventory levels as a way of reducing costs subsequently leading to enhanced operational efficiency (Dange, Shende, & Sethia, 2016). Accurate inventory control further facilitates a quality-centric approach where matching inventory with demand can minimize waste and maximize consumer satisfaction (Kumar, Rabbani, & Khan, 2024). The role of digital inventory technologies on product design and quality: Digital technologies such as RFID, IoT, and advanced analytics facilitate real-time inventory tracking, enhance the level of efficiency, and decision-making in organisations and are central to efficient inventory management systems (Ali, Fayad, Alomair, & Al Naim, 2024). The nature of inventory management has shifted toward quality with much of the operational efficiency due to the digital design of products and services (Martinelli, 2024). Digital tools and systems have changed traditional approaches towards inventory management (Kumar et al., 2024). The design of products and services can be personalised by utilizing integrated digital technologies and products that are digitally designed can be modularised such that they can be swapped out easily at production stages thus making inventory management more efficient (Ceschin, 2016). Digital designs affect how products are produced and their quality through the design thinking process which places the customer at the center to ensure quality outcomes from the onset (Kumar et al., 2024). A study by Barlow, Bedford, Revie, Tan, & Walls, (2021) notes that the application of digital tools in a series of design processes has achieved an increasingly higher grade of control in quality due to increased precision and consistency. Improved design techniques facilitate a culture rooted in testing and prototyping thereby improving and ensuring better quality products (Barlow et al., 2021). Conclusion: By incorporating digital tools and automation, product designers realize a closer correlation between production outputs and consumer expectations, which in turn optimize inventory levels. High-quality digital design frameworks of an inventory system reduce errors and ensure the upkeep of consistent quality standards of goods and services, something that directly influences customer trust and repeat purchasing behaviour (Martinelli, 2024).

This paper explores how a processual approach can lead to the development of digital adaptation mechanisms for resilient operations in the digital society. This form of conceptualization implies a change of enterprise, from one state to another. Recent events such as the lingering COVID-19 pandemic proved that the current operating models of enterprises are woefully unprepared for interconnected, but disruptive global events despite Castells (2000) warning that there was already a shift to a ‘technological paradigm of the ‘network society’, or in the contemporary sense, the “post-industrial” digital society. In this technological paradigm, the ‘network’ concept is used as an organizing metaphor in which new forms of flexible and adaptable organizational structures are required to address the digital challenges facing enterprises today, yet the hierarchical ‘factory’ model of the industrial revolution remains dominant in contemporary enterprises. The adaptability of the enterprise to the new ‘technological paradigm’ remains challenging to navigate, evidenced through the pattern of digital transformation failures documented in both academic (Oludapo et al., 2024)and practitioner literature, even as the societal trends of ubiquitous data, unlimited connectivity and massive processing power are driving disruptions in several sectors of the digital society (Ross, 2019). These social trends, spurred by the commercialization of the Internet in the early 1990s, resulted in a step-change in the complexity of the effective world (Merali, 2006) resulting in various dilemmas, the root causes of which can be explored by challenging the assumptions of technological determinism that characterize many current digitalization initiatives. These undesirable outcomes from the implications of the three social trends and the assumptions linked to technological determinism (Oludapo et al., 2024) have seen emergence of dilemmas linked to increased dynamism, uncertainty and discontinuity in the competitive context, increased pressure for fast decision making under conditions of greater informational uncertainty due to global conflicts, increased importance of (internal and external) intelligence and the importance of flexibility and adaptability (and learning) for survival. To transcend technological determinism, Castells emphasized the need to recognize technologies as enablers, a concept which has improved understanding of digitalization, but remains limiting. Much more recently, Shapiro and Jean Ross have called for considering digital technologies as ‘inspiration’, that is, they inspire and are the foundation for rapid business innovations. While some (Following Piccoli et al., (2024), the view of digital transformation as the metamorphosis of an IT-enabled organization into a digital organization – is used to motivate for a digital architecture, based on design principles. This paper adopts a systems perspective to explore how a process-based approach can lead to addressing these dilemmas guided by the following research question:“How can a process-based approach guide the development of digital adaptation mechanism for resilient operations?”