Identification of critical success factors, risks and opportunities of Industry 4.0 in SMEs

SMEs, as prominent actors in industry, must meet more and more complex customer expectations. Recently, the concept of Industry 4.0 has emerged. This new approach enables the control of production processes by providing real-time synchronisation of flows and by enabling the production of unitary and customised products. Our research goal is to identify Industry 4.0 risks, opportunities and critical success factors with regards to the industrial performance of SMEs. The recent emergence of Industry 4.0 and the inherent difficulty of identifying detailed examples has not yet enabled a satisfactory statistical study to be conducted on Industry 4.0 cases in SMEs. To reach our research goal, we selected 12 experts…