Process Planning in Industry 4.0—Current State, Potential and Management of Transformation

Abstract

The implementation of the Industry 4.0 concept enables the flexibility, modularity and self-optimization of the manufacturing process. Process planning, placed in the value chain between construction and physical manufacturing, therefore, also demands digital transformation, while management of the transformation towards the new digital framework represents one of the most demanding challenges. Continuing the research on its structure and role within the smart factory, the main motivation for this work was to recognize the potential of the digital transformation of process planning elements, and to define the key dimensions that are essential for the readiness factor calculation and later transformational strategy formation, but also to recognize the current level of awareness of the Industry 4.0 concept among the process planners, along with the current use of its elements and key priorities for the transformation. The research has therefore been conducted in 34 Croatian metal machining companies, within which the influence of company size, level of education and familiarity with Industry 4.0 on final results and the stage of development have been investigated. The results have shown that the company size has a significant influence on the development stage and the use of certain elements wherein small and medium enterprises (SMEs) have already implemented certain digital elements, while they also tend to have a better fundamental infrastructure when using complex process planning methods, unlike others, which are still highly traditional. Organization and human resources have been ranked with the highest priority for change, while target goals for hardware and software have been set, with the managerial challenges of transformation defined and discussed.

Industry 4.0 Readiness Calculation—Transitional Strategy Definition by Decision Support Systems

“…For the “smart process planning” group of the elements the readiness factor was 0.609, for the “infrastructure” 0.342 and “organization and human resources” 0.773 ( Figure 9 ). Each of the three groups also has weighting importance weights ( Table 7 ), which were provided by the results obtained in the previous research by the expert group [ 67 ] and which were defined again by the normalized vector method ( Table 5 ). Therefore, to get a final readiness factor, each of the separate factors for the group was multiplied by its weight, described in (3).…”

Digital Literacy in Digital Society 5.0: Some Challenges

“…The concept of Industry 4.0 was created in Germany in 2011. It is generally defined as the fourth industrial revolution and has already brought about profound changes in the paradigm of the form of While Industry 4.0 is a concept that invests in digital technology to foster constant innovation in the form of production and services, with the resulting economic effects (Androniceanu, Georgescu, Tvaronavičienė, & Androniceanu, 2020;Berawi, 2019;Trstenjak, Opetuk, Cajner, & Tosanovic, 2020) through the "digitalization of production and digitalization of consumption" (Salimova, Vatolkina, Makolov, & Anikina, 2020, p. 486), its implementation and application have social consequences. Table 1 offers some of the most relevant impacts of digitalization on the workforce.…”

Industry 4.0‐Driven Development of Optimization Algorithms: A Systematic Overview

“…Sustainability focuses on meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs. ++++++ [49,50] Real-time capability It is the ability of a device or system to collect and analyze data as well as to respond instantaneously to a command, event, or input. ++++++++ [51,52] Modularity It determines which independent and interlocking subsystems build the system based on their functionality.…”