Factory subclasses relevant to Industry 4.0 challenges

Abstract

The practical probation results of the different future factories options innovative business strategies created today sufficient conditions to form the industrial companies second echelon (subclasses). Some future factories subclasses families are proposed and based on the business company models differentiation. There are varieties of services, sharing, system and study factories as the smart factory subclasses. There are varieties of open, pilot, creative and framework factories as the digital factory subclasses. There are varieties of cluster, client, route and recycling factories as the virtual factory subclasses. There is a similar scheme for all subclasses types of families. All factories subclasses are additionally grouped in the speciality of their business strategies. In essence, the satisfaction of customized consumer requirements or manufacturer market trading offers provision, which is equally actual for Industry 4.0.

Performance from building smart factories of small- and medium-sized enterprises: the moderating effects of product complexity and company size

“…Second, the path from supply chain integration to export performance was significant, whereas the path from production automation and big data utilization to export performance was insignificant. This result differs slightly from the existing literature on the relationship between building smart factories and export performance (Wiktorsson et al, 2018;Gurjanov et al, 2020;Sterlacchini, 2001;Shi et al, 2020). It appears that the reasons for such a disparity could be that previous studies only examined the relationship between smart factory building and export performance in general and did not concretely analyze the relationship by classifying building smart factories into production automation, big data utilization and supply chain integration.…”

“…Previous studies have theoretically examined the effect of building a smart factory on productivity and export performance (Illa and Padhi, 2018;Ramakrishna et al, 2017;Wiktorsson et al, 2018;Gurjanov et al, 2020), all of which presented results proving the existence of strong links. First, the communication skills between machines and products enable flexible production lines to be established for customized products, and information processing through a CPS can rapidly respond to production line failures (Zhang et al, 2020).…”

“…They achieve economies of scale and enhance export performance by securing new demands and increasing manufacturing capacity (Lu and Beamish, 2006). Companies that introduce smart factories improve export performance (Wiktorsson et al, 2018), gain a technological advantage in the global market and increase the export potential of manufactured products (Gurjanov et al, 2020). Although not many studies have examined the positive effect of a smart factory on export performance, relevant literature claims to support a positive relationship.…”

“…Finally, although building smart factories can boost productivity and export performance (Wang et al, 2018;Gurjanov et al, 2020), its impact on firm performance may vary depending on the characteristics of SMEs (Hudson et al, 2001). In particular, the amount of effort required to build a smart factory varies depending on the company size, as does the firm performance obtained (Moeuf et al, 2018;Mittal et al, 2018).…”

“…However, compared to the government support for smart factories from manufacturing powerhouses, systematic and academic approaches are insufficient, and research on SMEs in particular has been scarce (Mittal et al, 2018;Won and Park, 2020). Previous studies have been limited to theoretical claim that the establishment of a smart factory increases productivity and export performance (Illa and Padhi, 2018;Ramakrishna et al, 2017;Wiktorsson et al, 2018;Gurjanov et al, 2020).…”