Smart Manufacturing Systems for Small Medium Enterprises: A Conceptual Data Collection Architecture

Abstract

Smart manufacturing is the future of sustainable manufacturing entities with the emergence of innovative technologies readily available to foster industrial production. It becomes imperative for Small Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) to adopt the initiatives of the fourth industrial revolution termed Industry 4.0, to improve productivity and efficiency. SMEs are vital for the economic growth and social transformation of any nation, as such incorporating emerging technologies would generate more revenue and support sustainability. One of the major challenges facing the SMEs in a competitive and dynamic manufacturing environment is adapting the technique and implementation of smart enabled systems. The current manufacturing data information architecture for smart manufacturing is premeditated for big organisations with funding and skills to implement such systems, however SMEs struggles to cope with such advancement. This paper aim to propose a concept based data collection architecture to aid SME using the systems of smart manufacturing for internetwork communication, prediction and analysis. This study proposes a conceptual data architecture framework, which SMEs can utilise for data collection and integrate into any type of small-scale industrial production settings to enable effective decision-making. The successful demonstration of the concept is to gear manufacturing SMEs towards smart systems with no-need for high-level implementation techniques.