# Revolution 4.0: Industry vs. Agriculture in a Future Development for SMEs
## 1 Introduction  
The Industry 4.0 approach permitted the creation of an environment in which all elements are continuously and effortlessly linked together. All devices (e.g., CPS, cyber-physical systems) and functionalities are addressed as services, which constantly communicate with each other, thus achieving a high level of coordination [1; 2; 3; 4]. In this way, the ability to coordinate activities is essential for improved supply chain management, where optimization normally requires the contemplation of many elements in constant competition with each other [5]. In this innovative background, despite the advantages of industry 4.0 for large enterprises, small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) often face complications in innovative processes due to the continuous development in innovations and technologies [6]. Such condition makes it difficult to monitor enterprises, increasing also the complexity of which these processes can be implemented [7; 8]. SMEs, such as industrial players, must work on improving their operations management (e.g., production control, planning and execution, operational performance measurement, and assessment) [9; 10] and meet more complex customer needs [11; 12]. In fact, SMEs are firms known for their flexibility and nearness to customers [13; 14; 15; 16]. Their size ease communication and changes among employees, thereby enabling quicker reconfiguration in the event of change in demand. Though,SMEs mostly have short-term strategies, which do not favor long-term investments, consequently they end up weak on investment capacity and working performance [11; 17], with high costs in respect to large firms. These innovations also affect small and medium farms, which must invest in advanced technology to keep up with the evolution. Starting from the differences between traditional industry and agriculture, there are already some critical and divergent aspects. Farming supply chains diverge in numerous aspects from the industrial sector [18]. In agriculture, the flow of products, knowledge, and information among agricultural stakeholders (productors and consumers) at each stage of the agricultural processes, marketing, and consumption [19]. Such relations in the industrial sector take place only in the presence of industrial districts [20; 21]. Nevertheless, industry strongly manage its supply chains based on quantitative methods compared to agriculture. In fact, experience-based heuristic methods play a key role in agriculture where environmental exposure and stochastic events contribute a high degree of supply chain uncertainty and a lack of predictability in rural activities (e.g., soil and nutrient dynamics, photosynthesis activity or pest infestation) [18]. Existing approaches in agricultural supply chains try to take benefit of recent technologies related to the digitalization era, such as precision farming, which makes use of positioning technologies combined with the application of extra sensors and the collected data increasing the yield [22; 23]. Technological solutions deliver significant influences towards transforming the challenges of agricultural supply chain management into opportunities. Simple technologies, e.g., Bluetooth, GPS (Global Positioning System), or RFID (radio frequency identification), combined with the communication among operators and agricultural machinery at all levels of collaboration, make it conceivable to create a self-optimizing agricultural supply chain structure [23]. Fixed in an innovative agricultural management platform, these technologies can be easily organized and used by all involved stakeholders without committing to major investments. However, a modern farm produces data and, therefore, it requires interpreting them. Nevertheless, to digitalize the agriculture business, new technologies and software cannot solve all trials of the digital transformation along the supply chain [19; 24; 25; 26].