The transition towards Industry 4.0: business opportunities and expected impacts for suppliers and manufacturers

Industry 4.0 is today one of the major opportunities for companies competing in the market. In last few years, more and more companies have started to define the path to move from their traditional production systems towards the Industry 4.0 paradigm; accordingly, different models have been proposed in literature to support the business transformation. This paper reviews the technological improvements proposed by Industry 4.0 to understand what are the main processes involved in the transformation and what are the suitable strategies to face the business and operational changes that are required. In particular, we identify and discuss two main perspectives: the suppliers and the customers. For both of them, different business opportunities are presented, and the expected performance improvements discussed.