The Impact of Industry 4.0 on Supply Chains in Engineer-to-Order Industries - An Exploratory Case Study

By employing Cyber-Physical-Systems and real-time interconnection in industrial value creation, the term Industry 4.0 expresses expectations towards a fourth industrial revolution. Current research in context of Industry 4 0 mainly focuses on production itself or on production-related logistics processes. However, interconnection across the entire supply chain is required to successfully obtain the potentials predicted for Industry 4.0 Still, supply chain management been scarcely investigated by current research in contrast to solutions based on Industry 4.0 in production. Therefore, this paper attempts to address the topic of supply chain management in context of Industry 4.0. We employ a case study design of a German Engineer-to-Order industrial enterprise and its five logistics partners, which together composes an entire supply chain, finding challenges, potentials and recommendations for Industry 4.0 integration. (C) 2018, IFAC (International Federation of Automatic Control) Hosting by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.