Conceptualizing smart manufacturing readiness-maturity model for small and medium enterprise (SME) in Malaysia

Manufacturing enterprises today are forced to face radical challenges in the disruptive concepts of Smart Manufacturing (SM) and Industry 4.0 to stay competitive. Most Multinational Enterprise (MNEs) have initiated their journey towards adopting SM. As a mainspring of many manufacturing economies, Small and Medium-Enterprise (SMEs) are still struggling to understand the complexity offered in SM, and many of them are not ready to embrace the concept of SM. To overcome this, SMEs first need to assess their readiness and maturity before embarking on an SM journey. The existing available readiness assessment model seems to be suitable for MNEs, and there is still a lack of tailored models that suit SMEs. This paper sought to pinpoint the conceptual framework from the review of the existing readiness-maturity assessment and identify the gap of existing model as well as proposed a tailored model framework that are suitable for SMEs. Ultimately, this model will be used to pursue a comprehensive scholarly study across Malaysia. The proposed model is enhanced with 4M attributes as the dimension and embedded with the characteristic of Industry 4.0 build component to help the SME’s overcome the possible uncertainties in adopting SM concept