The Synergic Relationship Between Industry 4.0 and Lean Management: Best Practices from the Literature

Industry 4.0 promises to make manufacturing processes more efficient using modern technologies like cyber-physical systems, internet of things, cloud computing and big data analytics. Lean Management (LM) is one of the most widely applied business strategies in recent decades. Thus, implementing Industry 4.0 mostly means integrating technologies in companies that already operate according to LM. However, due to the novelty of the topic, research on how LM and Industry 4.0 can be integrated is still under development. This paper explores the synergic relationship between these two domains by identifying six examples of real cases that address LM-Industry 4.0 integration in the extant literature. The goal is to make explicit the best practices that are being implemented by six distinct industrial sectors such as automotive, paper, furniture, healthcare, apparel, and machine manufacturing.