Technological transformation of manufacturing by smart factory vision: industry 4.0

The rapid advances of information technology in recent years have provided an unprecedented opportunity for enterprises to transform their production systems by establishing “Smart Factories” where manufacturing activities are carried out through self-managing machines without the need for human operators. Having to keep pace with this development, countries and businesses are making great efforts to adapt to Industry 4.0 strategies in order to have competitive advantage. In line with this trend, this study has two objectives. The first is to identify firms and sectors that support Industry 4.0 in the manufacturing processes of leading countries in highly competitive markets of the global economy. The second is to examine the contribution of this approach to enterprises and their manufacturing processes. These objectives will enable us to determine the primary sectors in Turkey in which the Industry 4.0 approach can be applied. To this end, several companies were selected from those operating in Turkey and in the top 15 countries (out of a total of 138) ranked by the Global Competitiveness Index Report (GCIR) published by the World Economic Forum (WEF) in 2016.The names and application areas/sectors of those that support the Industry 4.0 approach in their manufacturing processes were determined. Contributions of the Fourth Industrial Revolution applications of some of the leading companies to manufacturing processes and operations were investigated by qualitatively examining the websites of these companies using descriptive analysis technique. This study is more like a review article consisting of information and findings from different sources collected, analyzed, incorporated and evaluated. The result of the study shows that Industry 4.0 is regarded as a productive business model approach that allows each data to be collected, observed and analyzed in the manufacturing environment. It can be stated that enterprises that apply this approach also aim to achieve more cost-effective production in larger quantities with higher quality and reliability at higher speeds with at least twice the efficiency, and minimum energy use, less heat generation, and less resource and memory use.