Industry 4.0 (MES Implementation by SMEs)

Technological leaps have led to shifts in paradigm which nowadays known and named as “industrial revolutions”. The mechanization field is where the so-called 1st industrial revolution took place, the intensive use of electrical energy led to the second industrial revolution, and the widespread of digitalization led to the 3rd one. On the basis of an advanced digitalization within manufacturing plants, combining the Internet technologies and future-oriented technologies in the field of “smart” objects (machines and products) seems to be in the way of resulting a new fundamental paradigm shift in industrial production. A great challenge is represented by the Industry 4.0 for businesses in general and for SMEs in particular. The study at hand will observe and document SMEs´ awareness, readiness and capability to meet this challenge. A Manufacturing Execution System (MES) is a system that companies use as a way of measuring and controlling production activities. As the base of installed MES grows significantly and due to the growth pace of the market, more vendors and implementation partners are entering the market. Organizations that intend to successfully implement a MES solution need to be informed and educated in a well manner about the intricacies of software implementations. Organizations need to ensure that they are in full control of the process of implementation and not at the mercy of the software vendors and implementation partners for success. The main objective of this thesis is to investigate the implementation process of Manufacturing Execution System by SMEs by studying a real case study of a company in Italy and documenting all the steps and problem encountered during the process to be a reference for other companies planning to take this step in the near future. Finally, analysing the data which can be extracted after implementing the system and studying to which extent this data can be used for optimization to draw a conclusion.