Industry 4.0 as digitalization over the entire product lifecycle: Opportunities in the automotive domain

Industry 4.0 is an important trend aiming at increasing competitiveness and rebalancing value creation in global networks. It targets the reduction of production costs while improving product quality and production scalability and individualization by means of digitalization of product and production. Products as well as their production are becoming cognitive and can therefore better adapt to given customer needs or production variations. In this paper, we discuss impacts of Industry 4.0 along the entire automotive supply chain. In particular, we illustrate that Industry 4.0 in the automotive context has a high cross-impact between development, production, operation and maintenance, thus requiring innovative solutions along the entire value creation chain. We enhance the commonly understood scope of Industry 4.0 towards digitalization over the entire product lifecycle and introduce data-driven business models to support exploitation of opportunities coming from this digitalization over the supply chain. We also propose a seamless cost engineering discipline in the automotive context for enabling a more systematic analysis and monitoring of the foreseen production costs from early development phase until SOP. This leverages system optimization to fulfil customer expectations from a functional, contextual and from an affordability point of view.