The attention devoted to Industry 4.0 by scholars, managers and policy makers has grown exponentially in the last few years. The goal of this paper is to empirically investigate the main barriers and difficulties faced by small and medium sized enterprises in Industry 4.0 implementation. We perform a systematic literature review on the topic and conduct some focus group studies in four countries (USA, Italy, Austria, and Thailand). We identify a set of barriers and obstacles and classified them into six categories: economic-financial, cultural, competencies/ resources, technical, legal, and implementation process. The results of the study have significant implications for both scientific research and management practice.

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A great challenge facing final manufacturers of final products and OEMs today is product variety management which is crucial for masscustomized manufacturing. Product variations in most industries tend to be very numerous and firms often find themselves under pressure to solve problems with over-inventories, planning and product assembly complexity. In this paper, we investigate and present an approach to creating all possible product configurations and variations based on a given number of base components and optional number of complementary components. The idea of determining all possible product architectures is to investigate the influence of product variety on complexity of assembly processes.

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