Table 7 Impact of Industry 4.0 on lean...

Table 7

Impact of Industry 4.0 on lean and operational excellence

We went to a company in Prague when I was at [previous position]. And this company was a lean company that married digital solutions to lean. So, their idea was that you must be Lean first. So, you Lean your process first, and then you digitize it. Too many salesmen will come to you and say, 'I have a solution. Put this in place, and your process will be lean.' You have to use, you know, tools like value stream mapping [VSM] and all of the other lean tools to make your process lean. And then, you put a digital solution on top. Otherwise, you have got an inefficient digital solution because all you are doing is digitizing the waste that already exists today. I think Industry 4.0 will help the Lean program. But we need to be lean before we digitize this kind of mantra, yeah” (P9)
“It is just very important to me that we do not consider all of the Industry 4.0 toys, and we do not just think, 'Oh, we just need those toys to make us lean, we need those toys to give us data integrity.' That is not really how we want to work at all. We do want to take ourselves forward and get to the point of machine learning, AI. We do not need AI across all of our lines. We don't need machine learning on all of our vision systems. I worked for another company before I joined here, and the site drive was, ‘this is going to be the factory of the future. So, we're going to have all of these toys.’ That was the driver. And it is very, very hard work if you are just trying to fit toys (sic … technologies) in. If you're just fitting them, then you've completely missed the point of the technology. It is really important to start that digital journey, but it is important to start for the right reasons so that cultural transformation happens” (P7)
“I would say that a lot of what Industry 4.0 does is it drives the Lean programs to some extent. You know, I mean, you do not need to have technology in a Lean program. But I think the implementation of some technologies assist the lean program” (P2)
“The whole Lean program and, I suppose, business process transformation go hand in hand with any transformation. Be it digital transformation or process transformation, or anything like that. My experience from outside this organization is that sites or organizations that have just brought the technology in either have not involved their Lean team or have not looked to change their process and have struggled to adopt the technologies. So, I love this question; it is an important factor for me to adopt Lean first” (P3)

We went to a company in Prague when I was at [previous position]. And this company was a lean company that married digital solutions to lean. So, their idea was that you must be Lean first. So, you Lean your process first, and then you digitize it. Too many salesmen will come to you and say, 'I have a solution. Put this in place, and your process will be lean.' You have to use, you know, tools like value stream mapping [VSM] and all of the other lean tools to make your process lean. And then, you put a digital solution on top. Otherwise, you have got an inefficient digital solution because all you are doing is digitizing the waste that already exists today. I think Industry 4.0 will help the Lean program. But we need to be lean before we digitize this kind of mantra, yeah” (P9)

“It is just very important to me that we do not consider all of the Industry 4.0 toys, and we do not just think, 'Oh, we just need those toys to make us lean, we need those toys to give us data integrity.' That is not really how we want to work at all. We do want to take ourselves forward and get to the point of machine learning, AI. We do not need AI across all of our lines. We don't need machine learning on all of our vision systems. I worked for another company before I joined here, and the site drive was, ‘this is going to be the factory of the future. So, we're going to have all of these toys.’ That was the driver. And it is very, very hard work if you are just trying to fit toys (sic … technologies) in. If you're just fitting them, then you've completely missed the point of the technology. It is really important to start that digital journey, but it is important to start for the right reasons so that cultural transformation happens” (P7)

“I would say that a lot of what Industry 4.0 does is it drives the Lean programs to some extent. You know, I mean, you do not need to have technology in a Lean program. But I think the implementation of some technologies assist the lean program” (P2)

“The whole Lean program and, I suppose, business process transformation go hand in hand with any transformation. Be it digital transformation or process transformation, or anything like that. My experience from outside this organization is that sites or organizations that have just brought the technology in either have not involved their Lean team or have not looked to change their process and have struggled to adopt the technologies. So, I love this question; it is an important factor for me to adopt Lean first” (P3)

Source(s): Authors’ own work

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