Towards the implementation of Industry 4.0: A methodology-based approach oriented to the customer life cycle

TL;DR

The paper tackles enabling Industry 4.0 adoption for SMEs by focusing on the customer life cycle, an under-addressed area, and proposes a methodology that couples semantic knowledge representations with 3D visualization to design new customer-focused software services. It details a stepwise process including objectives definition, semantic description building, 3D visualization, architecture design, implementation, and deployment, with explicit activities and competency-question-driven validation. A real-world case study in Urola Solutions demonstrates three services—catalogue, search, and a virtual technician—built using the methodology, including Ontology ExtruOnt, Onshape CAD integration, and a Three.js visualization, achieving acceptable response times and positive usability feedback. The work suggests SMEs can leverage these pillars to improve customer interaction, experience, and loyalty, and outlines future work to broaden scope to other lifecycle phases and mobile deployment.

Abstract

Many different worldwide initiatives are promoting the transformation from machine dominant manufacturing to digital manufacturing. Thus, to achieve a successful transformation to Industry 4.0 standard, manufacturing enterprises are required to implement a clear roadmap. However, Small and Medium Manufacturing Enterprises (SMEs) encounter many barriers and difficulties (economical, technical, cultural, etc.) in the implementation of Industry 4.0. Although several works deal with the incorporation of Industry 4.0 technologies in the area of the product and supply chain life cycles, which SMEs could use as reference, this is not the case for the customer life cycle. Thus, we present two contributions that can help the software engineers of those SMEs to incorporate Industry 4.0 technologies in the context of the customer life cycle. The first contribution is a methodology that can help those software engineers in the task of creating new software services, aligned with Industry 4.0, that allow to change how customers interact with enterprises and the experiences they have while interacting with them. The methodology details a set of stages that are divided into phases which in turn are made up of activities. It places special emphasis on the incorporation of semantics descriptions and 3D visualization in the implementation of those new services. The second contribution is a system developed for a real manufacturing scenario, using the proposed methodology, which allows to observe the possibilities that this kind of systems can offer to SMEs in two phases of the customer life cycle: Discover & Shop, and Use & Service.

Figures (12)

• Figure 1: 3D extruder visualization on the rendering interface.
• Figure 2: Architecture.
• Figure 3: Home screen options in the user application.
• Figure 4: Main screen of administration module.
• Figure 5: Annotations generated when describing motor features.