Industry 4.0: Unleashing Its Future Smart Services

The drive to develop towards Industry 4.0 requires appropriate infrastructure in order to harness the full potential of its smart services in the future. Such infrastructure include the following: planning and technical development segments; materials and procurement process; production and manufacturing; and finally; warehousing and logistics. The latter should be transformed from the traditional labor-machine-intensive setup to one that is a completely digital. Progressively; there should be a moving towards a socio-technical-digital ecosystem; in which physical; virtual dimensions are increasingly intertwined for providing smart services. This emerging ecosystem should have more interactions between people; machines; and digital technologies to better serve the needs of society and very interesting benefits can be generated for both local and global economy. Industry 4.0 is interlinked with technologies such as Industrial Internet of Things; Data Sciences; Cloud Computing; Internet of Things; Smart Manufacturing; Advanced Robotics and Artificial Intelligence; 3D Printing; Virtual and Augmented Reality and Data analytics. The shelf-life of modern technologies is changing rapidly to more advance offerings. Organizations should embrace the unleashing of Industry 4.0 and its future smart services. Operations will depend on direct data obtained from the process of planning the necessary resources and optimizing facilities to function online with inbuilt autonomous maintenance. A critical and interesting challenge is also to study how such tools are used and inserted into the organization and its main functions. This paper is organized towards the key design concepts integrating tools and embeds to design industry 4.0 for smart services and innovations.