The Industry 4.0 production concept will also play a major role in medium-sized companies in the future.The buzzword "Industry 4.0" stands for the fourth industrial revolution. After mechanization with water and steam power, mass production with the help of assembly lines and the use of electronics to automate production, the focus is now on the networked use of information technology, which should make an individualization of industrial production possible. Large companies are making considerable efforts to be part of this development and thus remain competitive.

However, more than 70 percent of industrial employees in Germany work in small and medium-sized companies with fewer than 1000 employees. Dr. Gerrit Sames, Professor of Business Administration at the TH Mittelhessen, therefore conducted an empirical study to examine the role that Industry 4.0 plays there. 162 Central Hessian companies were surveyed, mainly from mechanical and plant engineering, metal production and processing, tool and mold making and manufacturers of plastic products.

A quarter of those surveyed were completely unfamiliar with the term Industry 4.0. Almost 10 percent stated that they were in a planning or test phase or had already implemented measures to implement the new production concept. Many companies cited the lack of standard and reference solutions as problems that made it difficult to implement the Industry 4.0 concept. Those who have not yet dealt with the topic at all named old machinery and a lack of IT specialists as further hurdles.

Only 22 percent of those surveyed stated that they had dealt with the topic of Industry 4.0. However, 64 percent say that machines and systems are networked in terms of information technology. According to Sames, this leads to the conclusion that a number of companies have already taken steps towards Industry 4.0 without associating them with it. Other questions in the study deal, for example, with data communication between machine and workpiece, the evaluation of machine data via a network or the use of internet technologies.

Only four percent of the companies do not attribute any importance to the Industry 4.0 concept for the future. However, two thirds of all companies are interested in external support to identify improvement potentials for their business processes in order to take Further steps towards Industry 4.0.

The complete study can be found at www.ebusiness-lotse-mittelhessen.de.