STRATEGIC MANAGEMENT AND INDUSTRY 4.0. AN EXPLORATORY STUDY THROUGH A MANUFACTURING CASE STUDY

The main objective of this paper is to answer questions such as: What are the most relevant strategic objectives that manufacturing companies want to pursue through Industry 4.0? Which are the most relevant processes and systems involved in the implementation process? Industry 4.0 is a new terminology first coined in Germany and launched in 2011 by the German Federal Government (Kagermann et al., 2011). It is well-known how the terminology refers to the new fourth industry revolution after the first revolution based on water and steam-powered machines, the second one based on electricity and third one based on electronics and information technology. Industry 4.0 strongly emphasises Cyber Physical Systems (CPS) with an integration of machinery, factory and business processes, which are capable of autonomously exchanging information, activating actions and making decisions and controlling each other independently (Kagermann et al., 2013). This digital industry revolution seems to be the dawn of a new era for the European manufacturing industry and the EU is bolstering it with many actions, including research and infrastructure funding in the sphere of the more general digital single market strategy (European Commission, 2015). An expected number of two million companies and 33 million jobs could be interested by this model (Davies, 2015). Industrialised European countries such as Germany, Italy, France and the UK have already embraced Industry 4.0 with specific initiatives. Italy is the second largest country in Europe in terms of manufacturing companies and the Ministry of Economic Development has launched some actions towards Industry 4.0 for Italian companies through a funded plan named ‘National Industry 4.0’. Although Industry 4.0 seems to be a strategic direction for European governments and for the European manufacturing sector, academics and practitioners still struggle to properly depict a model or an implementation path for Industry 4.0 (Hermann et al., 2016). The number of papers dedicated to this topic is raising very quickly and the literature is dealing with many solutions, especially from a technological point of view. However, being Industry 4.0 a ‘digital container’ filled with many different technologies, principles and systems, manufacturing companies are often disoriented when they come to Industry 4.0 implementation. Indeed, these companies have to set strategies and deploy them through such a number of technologies and systems. Apart from a general strategy of cost reduction, manufacturing companies through Industry 4.0 could achieve objectives in terms of product customisation, time to market, flexible and agile production, development of the supply chain and many other objectives