Industry 4.0 – For sustainable development of lean manufacturing companies in the shipbuilding sector

Abstract

The world we live today has been considerably influenced by industrial revolutions, continuous integration of new technologies and innovations in the production process. Identifying the key role of the industrial sector for job and innovation growth, as well as improvement of productivity and research infrastructure, a number of political, business and scientific initiates have boosted industrial renaissance on the top agenda in the innovation driven economies. Although, industry generates 80% of the EU private innovations and 75% of its exports, the global share of European manufacturing value added dropped from 36% in 1991 to 25% in 2011. EU industry accounts for about 15% of the total gross value added and in the shipbuilding sector the situation is even more challenging: European shipbuilding produces’ share worldwide decreased from 66% in 1960 to 2.4% in 2015 (Stopford, 2016). Many manufacturing initiatives have been started all over the world, re-establishing an industrial share in the economy. With an industrial gross value added of about 30% in Germany this approach has been named “Industry 4.0,”. A number of similar initiatives, e.g. “Advanced Manufacturing Partnerships” or “Made in China 2025” are being implemented in USA and China respectively. Innovation driven markets expect manufacturing companies, also in the shipbuilding sector to react appropriately to the rapidly changing network environments. One of the promising approaches matches virtual and real worlds by linking virtual and manufacturing environment. The paper investigates current shortcomings in the lean manufacturing of the shipbuilding sector or shipbuilding suppliers, utilizing modular manufacturing in a lean production process and the opportunities of utilizing Industry 4.0 approaches are discussed. The presented research is empirically validated by using the primary data samples from the shipbuilding sector companies from the Northern Germany.