Improve of business value for portuguese SME that adopt industry 4.0

Dissertation presented as partial requirement for obtaining the Master’s degree in Information Management, with a specialization in Information Systems and Technologies ManagementMany industrial organizations already began the Digital Transformation path, with the premise and objective of applying the features and models that Industry 4.0 brought to the industry field, particularly factories, creating a new context of smart factories that will provide higher revenue. Aggregated to Industry 4.0 new types of architecture were born, that will create great challenges in terms of security, control, interoperability among others. One of these areas is Edge computing that combines the very best of cloud and on-site computing. With the control authority, overall automation management and cloud based analytics, the edge systems answer the challenges identified as being crucial for any industrial 4.0 deployment. In this work the research methodology will consist of a comprehensive review and strategic analysis of existing global literature on those topics, in parallel with interviews and data analysis that were performed to entities representing the Portuguese Small and Medium Enterprises in the Industrial market. This work aims to contribute to stimulate the need of achievements, a more strategic and operational approach in the use of edge computing within organizations to clarify the existing strengths in this area. This way, Industry 4.0 strategy can be implemented with effective approaches and planned actions for a direct business value increase and also be able to create a reference model that could be applied in similar organizations. As a result, this work bring knowledge for companies, in the same market segment of the study, that want to adopt initiatives of industry 4.0