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Small and medium enterprises (SME) face various challenges in order to remain competitive in a global market. Industry 4.0 (I4.0) is increasingly presented as the new paradigm for improving productivity, ensuring economic growth, and guaranteeing the sustainability of manufacturing companies. However, SMEs are ill equipped and lack resources to undertake this digital shift. This paper presents the digital shift process of an SME in a personalized mass production context. Our work provides a better understanding of the interaction between Lean and I4.0. It contributes to the development of Lean 4.0 implementation strategies that are better adapted to manufacturing SMEs in a personalized mass production context. We also demonstrate the usefulness of simulation as a decision-making assistance tool when implementing I4.0. A practical case is documented to fill a gap in the scientific literature identified by several researchers.

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Selecting a suitable sewer network plan for a city is a complex and challenging task that requires discussion among a group of experts and the consideration of multiple conflicting criteria with different measurement units. A number of multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) methods have been proposed for analyzing sewer network selection problems, each having their own distinct advantages and limitations. Although many decision-making techniques are available, decision-makers are confronted with the difficult task of selecting the appropriate MCDM method, as each method can lead to different results when applied to an identical problem. This paper evaluates four different multi-criteria decision-making methods, which are the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), the Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS), Elimination Et Choix Traduisant la REalité (ELECTRE III) and the Preference Ranking Organization METHods for Enrichment Evaluations II (PROMETHEE II), for one sewer network group decision problem in the early stage of sewer water infrastructure asset management. Moreover, during the implementation of different MCDM methods, the Delphi technique is introduced to organize and structure the discussions among all the decision-makers. The results of the study are examined based on each method’s ability to provide accurate representations of the decision-makers’ preferences and their experience implementing each method. As a conclusion, decision-makers identify PROMETHEE II as their favorite method, AHP is more time and energy consuming and results in a number of inconsistencies, while TOPSIS loses information during vector normalization for multi-dimension criteria, and ELECTRE III’s results are inconclusive.

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