# PDCA 4.0: A New Conceptual Approach for Continuous Improvement in the Industry 4.0 Paradigm
## 3 Industry 4.0 and Continuous Improvement
### Industry 4.0 Design Principles and Technological Concepts  
I4.0 denotes an unprecedented transformation in both industry flexibility and agility. Nowadays, the business world recognizes the huge opportunities for growth offered by this innovation stream [34]. Several authors point out the advantages of integrating I4.0 technologies with LM [1, 4, 7, 12] and, more specifically, with CI [10, 11, 35]. In order to understand why the I4.0 trend is so important to CI projects, knowledge about I4.0 design principles and I4.0 technological concepts must first be acquired. In order to systematize the Industry 4.0 knowledge and describe its elementary constituents, [PERSON] et al. [36] conducted an extensive study resulting in four design principles of Industry 4.0, summarized in Figure 2.  
\begin{table}
\begin{tabular}{c c c c c c c c c} \hline \hline \multirow{2}{*}{**Challenges**} & **Information** & **KPI** & **Mapping** & **Diagnosis** & **Root Causes** & **Countermeasures** & **Implementation** & **Follow-Up and Standardization** \\ \hline \multirow{6}{*}{**I**} & Project status & & & & & & & & \\  & information & & & & & & & & \\  & can only be & & X & & X & & & & \\  & consulted in & & & & & & & & \\  & _Okeo Roons_ & & & & & & & & \\ \cline{2-10}  & Insufficient & & & & & & & & \\  & information on & & & & & & & & \\  & the current & & & & & & & & \\  & status of & & & & & & & & X & X \\  & problem- & solving & & & & & & & \\  & solving & & & & & & & & \\  & solving & & & & & & & & \\  & solving & & & & & & & & \\  & analysis & & & & & & & & \\ \cline{2-10}  & Inefficient & & & & & & & & & \\  & system for & & & & & & & & \\  & communication- & & & & & & & & \\  & ing best & & & & & & & & \\  & practices & & & & & & & & \\ \hline \multirow{6}{*}{**II**} & Use of basic & & & & & & & & & \\  & analytics tools & & & & & & & & \\ \cline{2-10}  & Lack of use of & & & & & & & & & \\ \cline{1-10}  & simulation and & & & & & & & & & \\ \cline{1-10}  & optimization & & & & & & & & \\ \cline{1-10}  & techniques & & & & & & & & \\ \hline \hline \end{tabular}
\end{table}
Table 2: Challenges and limitations of conventional practices for each CI activity.  
Along with I4.0 transition comes the availability of new or improved technological concepts to foster the business models transition [37; 38]. There is a proliferation of publications about these technologies addressing their identification, association, and relationships between [39; 40; 41; 42; 43]. [PERSON] et al. [44] summarized I4.0's technologies into eight different technological concepts: additive manufacturing, Cloud, manufacturing executing systems, Internet of Things and cyber-physical systems, Big Data, sensors, e-value chains, and autonomous robots. This clustering is simple, objective, and well-grounded by previous work. Nevertheless, other authors propose an organization of technologies driven by the type of use [41; 43; 45; 46], which is very useful for process-based analysis, such as the one made in this study. Based on these two approaches, an organization of the technological concepts just for the practical depiction of the proposed approach PDCA 4.0 is used (Figure 3). In total, 10 technological concepts are considered in this study: Internet of Things (IoT), cyber-physical systems (CPS), Big Data (BigData), Cloud (Cloud), sensors and actuators (Sens&Act), autonomous robotics (AutRob), simulation and virtualization (Sim&Virt), additive manufacturing (3 DP), manufacturing execution systems (MES), and e-value chains (eVC). The description and justification of each technological concept is presented in Appendix A.  
Figure 3: Coverage of each technological concept regarding other I4.0 concepts and technologies considered in this study.  
Figure 2: I4.0 design principles, adapted from [36].