Also in this model, the assessment provided only a rough overview of seven categories of Industry 4.0 so-called toolboxes (manufacturing/fabrication, design and simulation, robotics and automation, sensors and connectivity, cloud/storage, data analytics, and business management), but not of the single Industry 4.0 concepts and technologies. The model in was based on five maturity levels (novice, beginner, learner, intermediate, expert) as well as five dimensions (finance, people, strategy, process, product). The authors in were focused more on the maturity levels of the general implementation of an Industry 4.0 strategy but did not go into detail regarding single Industry 4.0 concepts. The first group of works focused on maturity-based assessment models determining the maturity/implementation of concepts and technologies from Industry 4.0. In a second screening reading all remaining works, a total of 13 research papers were considered for a further content analysis. In the first screening of title and abstract, a total of 19 works were encoded as firmly pertinent. Also, the year of publication confirmed this as 2 works were published in 2016, 14 works in 2018 and 16 works in 2019. This shows that the development of assessment models for Industry 4.0 in SMEs is a quite new topic and is already mainly discussed in scientific conferences and not yet so much in peer-reviewed journals. The remaining 31 works were published mainly as conference papers (22 works) and conference reviews (2 works), while 7 works were articles/reviews in journals and 1 had been published as a book chapter. In the search, only works in the English language were considered, excluding 1 work in German. The research team used for the literature analysis the following research query: (TITLE-ABS-KEY ("Industry 4.0") AND TITLE-ABS-KEY (assessment OR maturity) AND TITLE-ABS-KEY (sme OR "small and medium sized")) AND (LIMIT TO (LANGUAGE,"English")), with an output of 32 search hits. The analysis of existing assessment and/or maturity models for Industry 4.0 was based on a literature search in SCOPUS database, as this is one of the leading and most complete scientific databases for industrial and manufacturing engineering. Thus, the model’s objective was (i) to inform SMEs about the existing Industry 4.0 concepts, (ii) to assess the current progress in the implementation and application of these concepts, and (iii) to signalize to SMEs which of the Industry 4.0 concepts are the most important ones for the individual company. Subsequently, such a model should support SMEs simply and pragmatically to show their status of implementation and the potential for future Industry 4.0 projects. Therefore, an assessment model must clearly describe the concepts and also show the companies which different possibilities of concepts and technologies Industry 4.0 has to offer. Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are usually less informed about Industry 4.0 concepts. Further, it opens doors to new and enriched evaluation possibilities that are no longer addressing a problem of readiness of enterprises, but one affiliated to the maturity level associated to the Industry 4.0 implementation. Therefore this work aimed to enrich the evolution of Industry 4.0 assessment models giving a specific focus to small and medium-sized enterprises. However, there is still room for further improvements in the development of models for the evaluation of companies introducing Industry 4.0. For testing and validation purposes, the assessment model has been applied in a field study with 17 industrial companies. The maturity level-based assessment tool presented in this work includes a catalog of 42 Industry 4.0 concepts and a norm strategy based on the results of the assessment to support SMEs in introducing the most promising concepts. The aim of this research was to develop an assessment model for SMEs that is easy to apply, provides a clear overview of existing Industry 4.0 concepts, and supports SMEs in defining their individual strategy to introduce Industry 4.0 in their firm. Many of these SMEs have no overview of existing Industry 4.0 concepts and technologies, how they are implemented in their own companies, and which concepts and technologies should primarily be focused on future Industry 4.0 implementation measures. Despite efforts in research and knowledge transfer from research to practice, the introduction of Industry 4.0 concepts and technologies is still a major challenge for many companies, especially small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Industry 4.0 has attracted the attention of manufacturing companies over the past ten years.
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