When Business Process Re-engineering meets Industry 4.0: A concept paper

Abstract

The most important phenomenon of 21^st century, digital transformation, depends on emerging technologies driven by industry 4.0. Every industry must adapt to the changes that this digital age has brought us in order to offer faster and improved solutions to customers. New technology adoption also changes the business process models by offering additional products and services. Therefore, companies opting to adopt industry 4.0 need to re-engineer their current processes. Existing Business Process Re-engineering (BPR) methodologies lack the important concept of industry 4.0 adoption. Also, these methodologies take ideal business processes gathered with the help of subjective information either from industry expert interviews or organization’s documentation rather than the actual processes gathered from real data. This research provides a quick summary of industry 4.0 revolution and the need of a new BPR methodology which considers the challenges that arise because of industry 4.0 adoption. The focus is given to one of the major concepts in industry 4.0, data analytics, as process mining techniques can be applied to get actual view of existing business processes through real time event log data thereby increasing the success ratio of the re-engineering process. The proposed industry 4.0 enabled BPR and optimization methodology will serve as bases for planning digital transformation and will provide an easy and effective industry 4.0 adoption plan to manufacturing companies.