Identifying Challenges Related to Industry 4.0 in Five Manufacturing Companies

Abstract

The emergence of the 4th industrial revolution has resulted in significant improvement in the effectiveness of product and production development. Nowadays, research has been done focused on new technologies of integrated products and production platforms to support decision making in engineering processes. This means that there is the need to continuously explore different ways of integrating product and production platforms in industry. The aim of this paper is directed at finding the current state of practice in today´s industry with respect to their degree of automation. To make this achievable, a methodology based on the interactive research principles and the design research methodology is followed. As input data, six Swedish companies were interviewed in order to draw a picture of their challenges and needs for each lifecycle phase of selected products. The main contribution of this work is the identification of gaps in their product and production platforms as well as methods to address them. Struggling with understanding and adopting Industry 4.0, this paper also reviews the concepts and approaches related to digitalisation of product and production platforms. The results show that there are three application fields the companies have been facing: simulation and calculation, automation as well as data management. Within them, there are common aspects like lack of software tools, design and production automation, data migration and collection, or data handling in production. The findings of the study strongly suggest companies to adopt Industry 4.0 techniques to improve their product and production assets.