I want to summarize the publication "The Industrial Management of SMEs in the Era of Industry 4.0". It was published in the International Journal of Production Research (IJPR). IJPR is a well-established and highly successful journal reporting production and manufacturing research. Alexandre Moeuf, et.al studied the current fields of research addressing new changes brought to the production planning and control functions in SMEs in the era of Industry 4.0. Industry 4.0 provides a new paradigm for the industrial management of SMEs. Supported by a growing number of new technologies, this concept appears more flexible and less expensive than traditional enterprise information systems such as ERP and MES.
The scope of Industry 4.0 was limited based on the definition by Kohler and Weisz (2016) which is a new approach for controlling production processes by providing real-time synchronization of flows and by enabling the unitary and customized fabrication of products. The proposed literature review strategy was carried out using an innovative process that consisted of the execution of two separate queries (production planning and control and industry 4.0) followed by the analysis of the papers obtained to identify intersections between both concepts. They also proposed a framework for analyzing the selected papers based on the targeted performance objectives, the required managerial capabilities, and the different means of realization associated with the Industry 4.0 concept. Figure 1. illustrates the analytical framework.
They have adapted the works of Porter and Heppelmann (2014), initially proposed for measuring the capacity of new smart connected products and services to establish a list of four distinct managerial capacities like monitoring, control, optimization, and autonomy that aligned with the concept of Industry 4.0. Their survey identified 23 applied cases in which Industry 4.0 was used in SMEs. The reviewed publications show that the application of Industry 4.0 to SMEs is related to the monitoring of production processes and to the improvement of current capabilities and flexibility. Several use cases of Cloud computing and RFID tools are noted. Their study shows that the least expensive and least revolutionary technologies (simulation, cloud computing) are the most exploited in SMEs whereas those allowing profound business transformations (CPS, Machine to Machine, big data, collaborative robot) are still neglected by SMEs.
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