Industry 4.0 – Is Portugal prepared for the future?

• Autor(a) principal: Carvalho, Rui Miguel do Couto
• Data de Publicação: 2017
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10400.8/2952
• topic: Industry 4.0; Smart factories; Industrial revolutions; Internet of things; Cyber-physical systems; Domínio/Área Científica::Ciências Sociais::Economia e Gestão

Portugal, although never being a country that was in the front lines in the adoption and exploitation of any of the previous three Industrial Revolutions, would seem to now have a new chance in taking the lead with the fourth Industrial Revolution, the Industry 4.0. Industry 4.0 isn’t a concept with a very clear and agreed upon definition, but there are certain hallmarks that leads researchers to believe they are dealing with this phenomena. For example, technologies like Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS), the Internet of Things (IoT) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) are heavily referred when speaking of the “Smart Factories”. The culmination of these technological components integrated with a production line, will permit an organization to achieve higher results, this through the optimization of processes, as well as, making the products available to the consumers faster and with more customization options. The phenomena of the Industry 4.0 is one that is very appealing in terms of future promises that it makes, not only to the specific organization but to the host country as well. As such, a certain level of preparedness is desired form the companies within the country, in order for the adoption process be as seamless as possible. This notion lead to the creation of the “Preparedness Index”, which was generated with the data collected by an online survey created for this dissertation, with the responses of 149 Portuguese companies from various business backgrounds. With this index we could analyze the validity of four hypotheses, all pondering the level of preparedness of the host country in general (H1), as well as, the level of preparedness of certain key characteristics of the specific companies (H2, H3 and H4). All of the hypotheses here confirmed, this because the “Preparedness Index” itself was proven statistically viable. With these hypotheses proven we could conclude that Portugal is in fact, a country that is ready for the new innovations that the Industry 4.0 wants to bring.