Toward User-Centered Operational Excellence in Smart Manufacturing: A Systematic Literature Review and Proposed Socio-Technical Framework for Sustainable Performance

Smart manufacturing increasingly combines digital technologies with operational excellence and Industry 5.0 principles, yet evidence remains fragmented across technological, organizational, human, and sustainability perspectives. This study conducts a PRISMA 2020 systematic literature review of 115 manufacturing studies published between 2020 and 2026. The synthesis identifies intelligent digital capabilities, organizational readiness, human-centered capabilities, and operational excellence practices as recurrent evidence-derived dimensions, with sustainable manufacturing performance as the principal outcome domain. Building on these findings, the authors propose user-centered operational excellence (UCOE) as a conceptual higher-order capability that integrates digital intelligence, organizational alignment, human participation, and structured continuous improvement. The proposed architecture distinguishes evidence-derived dimensions from author-synthesized role assignments and links UCOE to operational and economic, environmental, social and human, and resilience outcomes under contextual and feedback effects. The corpus contains substantial review and conceptual evidence and comparatively limited direct industrial validation; consequently, the propositions are presented as testable theoretical relationships rather than established causal effects. The study provides an evidence-traceable basis for future construct validation and industrial testing of sustainable human-centered smart manufacturing.