Strategies to improve the industry 4.0 adoption and knowledge transfer for small and medium enterprises

Abstract

Abstract The 4th Industrial Revolution opened a new era which prompts unlimited opportunities and challenges for the manufacturing industry and for the small and medium-sized enterprises (SME). Industry 4.0 technologies like Internet of Things and Cloud Computing are changing the business and manufacturing structures in profound ways. Literature review during this research showed three main gaps: 1. Recent research works fail to address the implementation of Industry 4.0 technologies in SMEs from a practical viewpoint. 2. The few existing roadmaps for the implementation of Industry 4.0 lack a focus on SMEs. 3. A collaborative Industry 4.0 knowledge transfer platform or hub designed for SMEs is missing. To this end, a simple six-step roadmap is proposed that includes real implementations of Industry 4.0 in SMEs to cover the first two gaps. Additionally, related to the third gap, this research aims to enhance Industry 4.0 knowledge transfer through the development of a collaborative, web-based knowledge transfer Industry 4.0 platform. The outcome of this research is firstly a collection of practical examples to demonstrate that SMEs can access several Industry 4.0 technologies with low-cost investments using the six-step roadmap. Secondly a developed collaborative Industry 4.0 knowledge transfer platform that will be referred to as Industry 4.0 HUB.