Industry 4.0: Adoption challenges and benefits for SMEs
By Tariq Masood, P. Sonntag. Computers in industry (Print), 2020
492 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Abstract Future industrial systems have been popularised in recent years through buzzwords such as Industry 4.0, the Internet of Things (IoT), and Cyber Physical Systems (CPS). Whilst the technologies of Industry 4.0 and likes have many conceivable benefits to manufacturing, the majority of these technologies are developed for, or by, large firms. Much of the contemporary work is therefore disconnected from the needs of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), despite the fact they represent 90 % of registered companies in Europe. This study approaches the disconnect through an industrial survey of UK SMEs (n = 271, KMO = 0.701), which is the first in the UK that used to collect opinions, reinforcing the current literature on the most reported Industry 4.0 technologies (n = 20), benefits, and challenges to implementation. Flexibility, cost, efficiency, quality and competitive advantage are found to be the key benefits to Industry 4.0 adoption in SMEs. Whilst many SMEs show a desire to implement Industry 4.0 technologies for these reasons, financial and knowledge constraints are found to be key challenges.
Subfields: Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering, Management of Technology and Innovation
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d5c37a19ad8b21099e2c4549ceb39420107d04fb
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In Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering
In Management of Technology and Innovation
Citations in the corpus
- Applications of Wireless Sensor Networks and Internet of Things Frameworks in the Industry Revolution 4.0: A Systematic Literature Review (2022, background): “The real-time decision-making capability of each small and medium organization enables them to efficiently accept new technologies [60,61].”
- Future of industry 5.0 in society: human-centric solutions, challenges and prospective research areas (2022, background): “Industry 5.0 is considered the edge of the smart factory, where it communicates with robots and humans [13, 31].”
- Small business awareness and adoption of state-of-the-art technologies in emerging and developing markets, and lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic (2020, background): “We also intended to identify the challenges that inhibit the adoption of technology and innovations by SMEs in the EMDEs as the world prepares to launch the fourth industrial revolution (Masood and Sonntag 2020; Toro, Barandiaran, and Posada 2015).”