Smart Learning Factory – Skopje: Boosting the Lean 4.0 Journey in South-East Europe

Learning Factories (LF) are already considered as a fostering factor for wealth creation in any nation through obtaining promising environment for education, training and research, especially in manufacturing related areas. In the era of crises and transitions, manufacturing enterprises are facing diverse challenges and thus need to build up intellectual assets and capacities, inter alia, with regard to digitalization and AI, sustainability, productivity and organizational excellence. From global perspective, the problems are even deeper when it comes to the countries that are not that developed. Not supportive environment there, makes the creating a LF quite a challengeable task. This paper presents the efforts regarding the development of a LF in Skopje, the first Macedonian learning factory, named as Smart Learning Factory – Skopje (SLFS). The core interest of SLFS is Lean4.0. SLFS is envisioned as i) a showroom to discover new technologies for Lean and Industry 4.0, ii) training center for (up-/re-)skilling of (future) workforces, iii) laboratory for experimenting with new technologies and scenarios, and iv) a development hub for integrated solutions for the industry. This paper additionally emphases on the focal points of SLFS, i.e. Digital Lean. It is a software tool that pretends to help Lean implementation by aiding the performance of some basic Lean tools, both in case of initial and more mature Lean implementation.