Industry 4.0 technologies: Implementation patterns in manufacturing companies

Industry 4.0 has been considered a new industrial stage in which several emerging technologies are converging to provide digital solutions. However, there is a lack of understanding of how companies implement these technologies. Thus, we aim to understand the adoption patterns of Industry 4.0 technologies in manufacturing firms. We propose a conceptual framework for these technologies, which we divided into front-end and base technologies. Front-end technologies consider four dimensions: Smart Manufacturing, Smart Products, Smart Supply Chain and Smart Working, while base technologies consider four elements: internet of things, cloud services, big data and analytics. We performed a survey in 92 manufacturing companies to study the implementation of these technologies. Our findings show that Industry 4.0 is related to a systemic adoption of the front-end technologies, in which Smart Manufacturing plays a central role. Our results also show that the implementation of the base technologies is challenging companies, since big data and analytics are still low implemented in the sample studied. We propose a structure of Industry 4.0 technology layers and we show levels of adoption of these technologies and their implication for manufacturing companies.