Deriving essential components of lean and industry 4.0 assessment model for manufacturing SMEs

Quantifying lean and ICT architecture related to Industry 4.0 is a new challenge in Small and Medium Scale Enterprises (SMEs) that needs to be addressed by both research as well as enterprises themselves. Especially in the manufacturing sector, SMEs need to transform themselves into emerging trends such as industry 4.0 while practicing existing manufacturing philosophies such as Lean Production Systems (LPS) to be competitive in global markets. The major concern is that there are many assessment models available to measure the status of an enterprise related to either LPS or Industry 4.0. Often, these models are complex and don’t fulfill the requirements of manufacturing SMEs. On the other hand, most of the models only consider either lean or industry 4.0 elements. The outcomes of this research help to develop a hybrid model including both lean and industry 4.0 features suitable for manufacturing SMEs. The main objective of this research is to provide state of the art literature on existing assessment models and consequently map lean and industry 4.0 components to the specific characteristics of manufacturing SMEs. The paper concludes with a summary and outlook for our future research.