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Smart Factories

Student Name

Institute Name
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Definition

The digital manufacturing of the products with the help of the Internet of Things (IoT) in

the industries has termed smart factories. It is the advanced level of production and

manufacturing and allows flexibility and automation in the process of manufacturing. Such

systems in intelligent factories are not fully automated, but they also involve the physical and

control systems in which human involvement has also seen to command automated systems

(Farooqui, Bengtsson, Falkman & Fabian, 2020).

Summary

The research article by Grabowska (2020) has focused on the concept of smart factories

where digital operations have performed to manufacture the products. The author has researched

how the fourth industrial revolution has modernized and developed the manufacturing scope with

the help of technological support. Smart factories are the places where the production is done

with the help and assistance of machines and technologies rather than human labor. In smart

factories, the production processes have become efficient, competitive, and consistent. The data

management and consumer relations have also become active with the involvement of the

technology and digitalized platform. Artificial intelligence is used to gain manufacturing

excellence, and machines perform a lot of complex and repetitive tasks that save time and

resources.

This article has great significance and the views of the author can be used as evidence to

highlight the importance of the smart factories. As the term has been used in the title of the

research and the detailed version as well in the article. The credibility of the study is also high
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because it is peer-reviewed research and has been published in 2020 in the journal of

"Management Systems in Production Engineering."

Discussion

The article is related to the key term, "Smart Factories." It explains the functioning and

practicability of the smart factories to use intelligent technologies in the manufacturing of the

products at the industrial level to harness the benefits of efficiency and competitiveness. In the

future, every business will think to revitalize its traditional mode of manufacturing the products

and convert them into the digital one. Smart factories will establish by every company and

optimization of the business processes would become a priority, and the manufacturing capacity

of the plant would be enhanced by using big data, artificial intelligence, and data governance

techniques (Pei Breivold, 2020). As per the findings of Matt, Orzes, Rauch & Dallasega (2020),

with the prevalence of the smart factories, the skilled labor to operate the smart machines and

handle the technical positions would be hard to find for the medium and small firms as compared

to the large ones. This can hinder the growth of smart factories at a massive level and only large

firms will be able to continue the intelligent factory operations. The difference in the

performance of the firms may also reduce the competitiveness in the industry.

There is a need to educate the human workforce about the functioning of the smart

factories and to use the systems for the optimum results. The culture of knowledge sharing will

help the workers working in smart factories. They will learn to share the real experiences they

have at the workplace, and this will enhance their proficiency in using the latest and advanced

systems (Kaasinen et al., 2020). The establishment of smart factories helps in the manufacturing

efficiency in the Industry 4.0 era, and to make the smart factories successful, forms have to

invest not only on the technological side but also to train the manpower.they can effectively use
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the integrated processes to gain the maximum returns for the business. Smart factories give an

easy and effective solution for work and employee management issues and build an innovative

working environment to ensure maximum output from available resources. Industry 4.0 is the

biggest pros of smart factories because it gives more flexible and practical working solutions by

considering the challenges of the modern labor market.

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References

Farooqui, A., Bengtsson, K., Falkman, P., & Fabian, M. (2020). Towards data-driven approaches

in manufacturing: an architecture to collect sequences of operations. International

Journal of Production Research, 1-17.

Grabowska, S. (2020). Smart Factories in the Age of Industry 4.0. Management Systems in

Production Engineering, 28(2), 90-96.

Kaasinen, E., Schmalfuß, F., Özturk, C., Aromaa, S., Boubekeur, M., Heilala, J., ... & Mehta, R.

(2020). Empowering and engaging industrial workers with Operator 4.0

solutions. Computers & Industrial Engineering, 139, 105678.

Matt, D. T., Orzes, G., Rauch, E., & Dallasega, P. (2020). Urban production–A socially

sustainable

factory concept to overcome the shortcomings of qualified workers in smart SMEs.

Computers & Industrial Engineering, 139, 105384.

Pei Breivold, H. (2020). Towards factories of the future: migration of industrial legacy

automation

systems in the cloud computing and Internet-of-things context. Enterprise Information

Systems, 14(4), 542-562.
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