On the Way of a Factory 4.0: The Lean Role in a Real Company Project

In the last three decades, Lean Production has been largely adopted, while, more recently Industry 4.0’s technologies have been raised new management paradigms. Literature has been investigating the role played by Lean Production and Industry 4.0 and the interrelations between the two on the operations performances of companies. In this conference paper, we want to show a part of the results of an improvement projects, conducted in an Italian manufacturing company, in which Company’s first goal was to digitalize the workflow in order to enhance traceability. The goal of the project has been achieved, however the Lean Production played a preliminary important role to reduce the inefficiencies. This would be an example of an implemented improvement project in a company that looks at digitalization and it represented an interesting learning point for the company.