The purpose of this article is to collect and structure the various characteristics, technologies and enabling factors available in the current body of knowledge that are associated with smart manufacturing. Eventually, it is expected that this selection of characteristics, technologies and enabling factors will help compare and distinguish other initiatives such as Industry 4.0, cyber-physical production systems, smart factory, intelligent manufacturing and advanced manufacturing, which are frequently used synonymously with smart manufacturing. The result of this article is a comprehensive list of such characteristics, technologies and enabling factors that are regularly associated with smart manufacturing. This article also considers principles of “semantic similarity” to establish the basis for a future smart manufacturing ontology, since it was found that many of the listed items show varying overlaps; therefore, certain characteristics and technologies are merged and/or clustered. This results in a set of five defining characteristics, 11 technologies and three enabling factors that are considered relevant for the smart manufacturing scope. This article then evaluates the derived structure by matching the characteristics and technology clusters of smart manufacturing with the design principles of Industry 4.0 and cyber-physical systems. The authors aim to provide a solid basis to start a broad and interdisciplinary discussion within the research and industrial community about the defining characteristics, technologies and enabling factors of smart manufacturing.

Building on manufacturing servitization, midlife equipment upgrade services introduce a value-adding alternative to traditional, capital intensive and time-consuming equipment replacement. Midlife upgrades improve the performance of and add new functional capabilities to an equipment during its middle-of-life to satisfy customers’ evolving preferences. Recent explorative studies report a low adoption of this strategy in industry and attribute this to the limited strategic awareness and readiness of manufacturing firms. This study addresses this gap by, (i) revealing three sets of drivers (strategic, market, financial) that prompt manufacturers to offer equipment upgrade services; (ii) identifying distinctive capabilities and resources that are key to generate successful upgrade offerings leveraging the resource-based view as a theoretical foundation; and (iii) integrating the drivers, capabilities, and resources into a framework that manifests different stages of industrial service development process, namely, market sensing, development, sales, and delivery. Our novel framework provides a foundation for researchers to test, refine, and expand on why manufacturers provide upgrade services and how upgrade service offerings can succeed on the marketplace. Our framework can serve as a benchmarking tool to guide managers to identify capability gaps and prioritize capabilities to develop and offer successful upgrade offerings.