The industrial management of SMEs in the era of Industry 4.0

TLDR

Industry 4.0 introduces flexible, cost‑effective paradigms that surpass traditional ERP and MES systems, yet many SMEs lack the capacity to leverage these technologies for production planning and control. The paper reviews applied research on Industry 4.0 issues for SMEs. The authors classify studies with a new framework that maps performance objectives, managerial capacities, and technologies to each case. The review reveals that SMEs largely adopt only Cloud Computing and IoT for monitoring, neglecting production planning, and that existing projects remain cost‑driven with no evidence of business model transformation.

Abstract

Industry 4.0 provides new paradigms 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. However, SMEs find themselves ill-equipped to face these new possibilities regarding their production planning and control functions. This paper presents a literature review of existing applied research covering different Industry 4.0 issues with regard to SMEs. Papers are classified according to a new framework which allows identification of the targeted performance objectives, the required managerial capacities and the selected group of technologies for each selected case. Our results show that SMEs do not exploit all the resources for implementing Industry 4.0 and often limit themselves to the adoption of Cloud Computing and the Internet of Things. Likewise, SMEs seem to have adopted Industry 4.0 concepts only for monitoring industrial processes and there is still absence of real applications in the field of production planning. Finally, our literature review shows that reported Industry 4.0 projects in SMEs remained cost-driven initiatives and there in still no evidence of real business model transformation at this time.