What does Industry 4.0 mean to Supply Chain?

The term 'Industry 4.0' was coined to mark the fourth industrial revolution, a new paradigm enabled by the introduction of the Internet of Things (IoT) into the production and manufacturing environment. The vision of Industry 4.0 emphasizes the global networks of machines in a smart factory setting capable of autonomously exchanging information and controlling each other. This cyber-physical system allows the smart factory to operate autonomously. For instance, a machine will know the manufacturing process that needs to be applied to a product, what variation to be made to that product etc., so that the product can be uniquely identifiable as an active entity whose configuration and route in the production…