Abstract
With upcoming new smart technologies, Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) have to deal with the implementation of industry 4.0 and smart principles. Being known for their constraints in human, technical, and financial resources, SMEs may struggle in the transition phase during introducing industry 4.0. A case study from the Czech Republic should shed some light on the opportunities and issues of the introduction of industry 4.0 in an SME in practice.
Highlights
As economy transits towards industry 4.0, the expected changes will have impacts on companies of all sizes and branches
Studies showed that Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) are known to be weak players in supply chains (Vaaland and Heide, 2007), while industry 4.0 promises high potentials for those companies with less than 250 employees (definition by the European Commission (2003))
A first observation made after these four years was that the company was not able to implement all of its goals during the four-year period
Summary
As economy transits towards industry 4.0, the expected changes will have impacts on companies of all sizes and branches. Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) aggregated are the main industrial contributors in many countries and economies (Li et al, 2016). Industry 4.0 should have the potential to open markets and opportunities for SMEs (Kotler, Kartajaya and Setiawan, 2016) by decreasing transaction costs and applying new technologies (Catalini and Gans, 2020). SMEs are hesitant to introduce new technologies (Vaaland and Heide, 2007) due to the cost involved representing huge investments compared to the overall revenues of the companies (Sevinc, Gür and Eren, 2018). The implementation into the company's database should be done in a third phase with the enlargement of the ERP system. The data from the APS had to be linked with the ERP system
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