Supply chain management and Industry 4.0: conducting research in the digital age

Supply chain management and Industry 4.0: conducting research in the digital age Introduction In essence, Industry 4.0[1] enables an automated creation of goods and services as well as supply and delivery, which functions largely without human intervention. Industry 4.0 components and SCM 4.0 characteristics Industry 4.0 typically is declared as consisting of the following components and effects (based on Vogel-Heuser and Hess, 2016): service orientation based on CPS and the internet of services; CPS and multi-agent systems making decentralized decisions; interoperability between machine and human and virtualization of all resources; ability to flexible adaptation to changing requirements (cross-disciplinary modularity); Big data algorithm and technologies provided in real-time (real-time capability); optimization of processes due to flexible automation; data integration cross disciplines and along the life cycle; and access to data securely stored in a cloud or distributed data storage (e.g. blockchain). Combined with a discussion about metrics, this opens avenues for new interesting research questions on the cost and complexity of increased data availability and the resulting need for analytics. (2019) follow the design science methodology and use a novel algorithm to prove that an autonomous robot can perform stock-taking using RFID for item level identification much more accurately and efficiently than the traditional method of using human operators with RFID handheld readers.