When Industry 4.0 meets World Class Manufacturing: Developing a Smart Digital Retrofitting strategy for sustainable manufacturing operations

This paper develops an Industry 4.0 step-by-step implementation strategy drawing from the World Class Manufacturing methodology to achieve sustainable value creation in manufacturing operations. In particular, we focus on the first step of such a strategy – namely Smart Digital Retrofitting – a brownfield approach that integrates new technologies and sensors into legacy systems to achieve Industry 4.0 basic requirements of seamless communication, interoperability among machines, and real-time capability. We characterize this step with the socio-technical system factors, describe its positive outcomes in terms of productivity gains and waste and losses reduction, and discuss its theoretical and practical contributions.