The Industry 4.0 era has resulted in several opportunities and challenges for the manufacturing industry and for small and medium-sized enterprises (SME); technologies such as the Internet of Things (IoT), Virtual Reality (VR) or Cloud Computing are changing business structures in profound ways. A literature review shows that most large-sized enterprises have rolled out investment plans, some of which are reviewed during this research and show that Industry 4.0 investments in such companies exceed the turnover of SMEs in all cases (<€50 million), which makes access to those technologies by SMEs very difficult. The research has also identified two gaps: firstly, the recent literature review fails to address the implementation of Industry 4.0 technologies in SMEs from a practical viewpoint; secondly, the few existing roadmaps for the implementation of Industry 4.0 lack a focus on SMEs. Furthermore, SMEs do not have the resources to select suitable technologies or create the right strategy, and they do not have the means to be fully supported by consultancies. To this end, a simple six-step roadmap is proposed that includes real implementations of Industry 4.0 in SMEs. Our results show that implementing Industry 4.0 solutions following the proposed roadmap helps SMEs to select appropriate technologies. In addition, the practical examples shown across this work demonstrate that SMEs can access several Industry 4.0 technologies with low-cost investments.

Industry 4.0 brings opportunities for small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), but SMEs are lacking Industry 4.0 knowledge, and this might result in a challenge to support SMEs’ competitiveness and productivity. During recent years, the European Commission and some government initiatives have been fostering the transition toward Industry 4.0 for SMEs through the creation of Digital Innovation Hubs, the Plattform Industrie 4.0, and some other initiatives. Nonetheless, the authors consider that the lack of knowledge is still a risk toward Industry 4.0 transformation for SMEs. New ways to improve Industry 4.0 knowledge management and especially the knowledge transfer must be developed. When SMEs start the transition to Industry 4.0, first of all, they do not want to start from scratch, and secondly, it can be easy to get lost in the multitude of technologies and tools that are available in today’s market. There is a gap in which to provide a collaborative Industry 4.0 knowledge transfer platform or hub designed for SMEs. Therefore, this research aims to enhance Industry 4.0 knowledge transfer through the development of a collaborative, web-based knowledge transfer Industry 4.0 platform. The outcome of this research is a developed platform that will be referred to as Industry 4.0 HUB.