A New Industry 4.0 Approach for Development of Manufacturing Firms Based on DFSS

Abstract

The adoption of Industry 4.0 is attracting manufacturing companies, but the implementation barriers they expect to face, such as huge investment costs, and lack of skilled workers and infrastructure, make many of them hesitate to go through with implementation. The lack of a standardization approach also adds more difficulties in the implementation of advanced key technologies. Based on the design for the six sigma (DFSS) method, a new decision-making and implementation approach (DM&I) is proposed to address some implementation barriers and provide strategic guidance to implement the Industry 4.0 advanced key technologies. In this study, a systematic literature review was conducted to determine the impact of the implementation barriers for Industry 4.0 adoption. The DM&I approach has been applied in a bearing ring production line as a real case. The proposed method consists of two steps: decision-making, which consists of the define phase in determining the exact system weak point in order to reduce the improvement risk and system operation disturbance; the evaluate phase, which is the determining of the level of use of key technologies; the visualize phase, which is the stage of designing and modeling the proposed system and creating the virtual environment to simulate the system in real-time in order to support the improved decision-making process and avoid the fear of high costs; and then the optimize phase, where the optimal level of use of key technologies is determined. Then, the implementation phase consists of the develop phase, which encompasses the stage of physical system construction and hardware software development, followed by the validate phase and the integrate phase. These phases support infrastructure improvement. However, the proposed approach can be used by manufacturing companies to improve production efficacy and competitiveness.