Digital Capability Center Aachen

The Digital Capability Center in Aachen is the leading experience and learning center for digital manufacturing and supply chain. The center features a model factory with real machines, products, and operators. We teach participants the technical, management, and people skills required to start, scale, and sustain their digital manufacturing transformation. Our motto: explore, try, and apply.

The Digital Capability Center in Aachen was founded by McKinsey & Company and ITA Academy GmbH in a cooperation with leading technology partners and innovative start-ups. The center supports your digital manufacturing transformation journey—from start to finish. A successful digital manufacturing transformation is based on three principles:

Diagnosis to design

Identify specific use cases and a digital production ecosystem, including a clear perspective on how and where digital will create bottom-line value, phased along a multi-horizon roadmap.

Technology to impact

Capture value from specific applications that are based on rock-solid cybersecurity; learn an agile approach to develop pilots; and refine solutions through rigorous change management.

Capabilities to transform

Focus on a thorough organizational change process, including capability building, C-suite sponsorship, and the holistic adaptation of digital processes and talent.

From the first impulse to the final roadmap, from Aachen to your organization

A digital transformation always involves management, technology, and people. It spans the entire value chain, from suppliers to production to customer service. But no two initiatives are the same. Therefore, we tailor each training program to your specific need.

An initial impulse: The Industry 4.0 Day

In the half- to full-day session you will experience how easy-to-integrate digital applications can optimize processes in an existing production.

Kick-start your transformation: Strategy and roadmap workshop

This one- or two-day workshop is a tailored offering aimed at kick-starting your company’s digital transformation. Work with our experts and put your current initiatives to the test.

Deep dive: Capability Building

Learn how to lead digitally. Work with our experts to develop strategies and methods for establishing a “digital way of working” across your organization.

Offerings at Aachen

Digital Manufacturing

Clients learn about digital use cases and have the chance to evaluate their usability and profitability. They also learn to start, scale, and sustain a digital-manufacturing transformation and develop the required technical, management, and people skills.

Digital Supply-Chain Management and Warehousing

Clients learn about the automation in the warehouse, dynamic network and routing optimization, automated root-cause analysis, advanced analytics in forecasting and demand planning and the path to ‘no touch’ order processing.

Smart Product Development

This offering pairs digital technologies with the principles of design to value and design to cost. This combination, along with product modularization and portfolio complexity, allows companies to develop cost-competitive products and increase the value perceived.

Digital Procurement

In strategic procurement, digital technologies are used to speed up data access and cleaning from multiple ERP systems, so companies can analyze larger data sets for greater savings insights. In operational procurement, digital is used to make the processes more consistent.

Digital Quality Management

Participants learn about role of quality in a lean environment, how to apply lean thinking to enhance the effectiveness of quality control and quality assurance, and how to secure the right balance between reactive and preventive quality. They also learn how digital solutions can optimize quality management overall.

Leadership Development

Clients develop the skills to engage, energize, and drive change across the organization. They learn what motivates people and drives their behavior at all levels of an organization, and they practice using these concepts to influence and mobilize others.

Videos

A Day in the life of a Digital Capability Center

A unique environment that allows visitors to see and touch Industry 4.0—the use of technology and analytics in operations.

Developing digital industry leaders

The Digital Capability Center in Aachen, part of the McKinsey global network of Digital Capability Centers, is a model factory with real machines, products, and operators. It helps us teach participants how they can enhance their existing value chain with digital technologies and solutions.

Industry 4.0: Digital Capability Center in Aachen

A new kind of learning factory focused on Industry 4.0, the Digital Capability Center in Aachen is for manufacturing specialists and managers, as well as future engineers. It offers such professionals the tools they need to drive their own company’s digital transformation. Have a look: This video guides you through the Digital Capability Center.

Digital factory twin - a virtual tour of the Digital Capability Center Aachen

Take a virtual walk-through in the digital twin of the Digital Capability Center in Aachen, to explore indoor environments within a high-quality 3D model.

Take a virtual tour of the Digital Capability Center

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