Sustainability, Vol. 11, Pages 2960: A Comprehensive Framework for the Analysis of Industry 4.0 Value Domains (Sustainability)

Industry 4.0 aims to ensure the future competitiveness of the manufacturing industry by providing Companies with the ability to react to rapid product changes and disturbances, efficiently and reliably, through re-configurability. In this paper, we explore the value creation process within Industry 4.0, with special emphasis on its relationship with mass customization and the sustainability issue. Based on the identified research gaps and opportunities derived from a literature review of relevant concepts, we propose the development of the Customer-Product-Process-Resource (CPPR) 4.0, a comprehensive framework that puts the value proposition-creation-capture cycle proper of an Industry 4.0 environment, in the context of a manufacturing organization’s customer-product-process-resources views. The usefulness of the proposed framework is exemplified by using it to derive system dynamics model of the mass customization paradigm. A discussion of the managerial implications of the obtained results for both the sustainability and the case of Small-to-Medium Enterprises (SMEs) is offered at the end of the paper.