Lean and Industry 4.0—Twins, Partners, or Contenders? A Due Clarification Regarding the Supposed Clash of Two Production Systems

By B. Rüttimann, Martin T. Stöckli. 2016

140 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Although Lean manufacturing techniques are not yet in place in every shop floor production, the so-called Smart Factory with the very promising German-coined label “Industry 4.0” is already making its tour. While the Toyota Production System (TPS) has shown to be the most performant manufacturing system, the Industry 4.0 initiative is still in the scoping phase with the demanding goal to become a highly integrated cyber production system. The partial and often limited knowledge about Lean production leads to distorted ideas that the two approaches are incompatible. In order to eradicate wrong statements, this paper tries to explain what Lean really is and how it has to be considered in the context of the Industry 4.0 initiative. Further, it discusses the existing contradiction within the Industry 4.0 goals regarding manufacturing performance and break-even point.

Subfields: Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e413f11812b7d8c57bb2a5ba5c234d05f5fda469

Citations in the corpus

• The link between Industry 4.0 and lean manufacturing: mapping current research and establishing a research agenda (2018, unknown): “…and academics in the last few years, no clear definition of the concept has been established; therefore, no generally accepted understanding of Industry 4.0 has yet been published (Brettel et al. 2014; Hermann, Pentek, and Otto 2016; Rüttimann and Stöckli 2016; Hofmann and Rüsch 2017).”