IMPACTS OF THE DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION IN THE WOOD FURNITURE INDUSTRY – FINAL RESULTS
Creators: name: Rumignani, Massimiliano
name: Fuentes, Julio Rodrigo
name: Solana, Joaquim
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2019
Subjects: wood, furniture, digital transformation, Furniture industry,

description: The adoption of Industry 4.0 new technologies is believed being one of the key drivers of change during this and next decades for the European industries, together with the Circular Economy. This research aimed to anticipate the understanding of these changes in order to facilitate and thus support the social dialogue among sector key actors and stakeholders and to properly face next years challenges and secure workers employability and safety, and companies’ competitiveness. With a massively connected and globalised economy, the wood furniture manufacturing industry will offer personalised smart products and services based on digital manufacturing systems supplied by resource-efficient and sustainable industries with an immense need for enough digitalization talents and skills securing a competitive transformation of the industry. A number of new technologies offer transformative business potentials, both in terms of the products and manufacturing processes, for those companies able to properly use and adopt them. An even greater transformation can come from the accumulated effect of the combination of several of these new technologies. Most of these technologies can be utilised by SMEs’ and large enterprises, making them suitable for a large part of the European wood furniture industry. Digitalization poses new challenges for occupational health and safety, but new types of workplaces, processes and technologies can increase the safety and health of workers. Workers may be removed from hazardous environments, and sensors may facilitate machineries maintenance. However, digitalization gives also rise to many new challenges and stresses for workers. Increasing automation can lead to a lack of sufficient understanding of the new processes and technologies. Workers may also be exposed to time pressure, an increased pace of work and workloads, tasks complexity, excessive working hours and constant reachability. The use of and cognitive interactions with robots/cobots can lead to mental stress or the risk of working alone and feeling isolated. Long working hours on computer screens and poor ergonomic design of non-office visual display unit workplaces may lead to musculoskeletal disorders. In order to reduce the above mentioned possible negative impacts while properly exploit the digitalization opportunities, companies, workers and all sector stakeholders and associations will have to join efforts and increase collaborations. Formal, Informal, Initial and Continuous VET will play a key role in supporting workers and managers and provide the new demanded skills, knowledge and competencies such as the seven survival skills of the future and the ones related with digital literacy, data security, engineering, science, technology and ICT. Changes in jobs tasks will create new needs for skills, knowledge and competences. Future employees of the furniture industry not only have to be able to efficiently perform tasks, but they have to possess as well the skills and ability to recognize, adopt and adapt to continuous changes. There is no increased need for hard skills, but the hard skills or technical skills need a complete integration of all relevant digital skills. Technical knowledge remains essential and forms the foundation; cognitive, social and behavioural skills will become a priority. People will no longer be selected on the basis of their diploma, but in function of their mindset. Each individual will become responsible for his or her own proficiency in learning and self-improvement.