Next Generation Industrial IoT Digitalization for Traceability in Metal Manufacturing Industry: A Case Study of Industry 4.0

This paper investigates digital traceability technologies taking careful consideration of the company’s needs to improve the traceability of products at the production of GPV Group as well as the efficiency and added value in their production cycles. GPV is primarily an electronics manufacturing service company (EMS) that manufactures electronic circuit boards, in addition to big metal products at their mechanics manufacturing sites. The company aims to embrace the next generation IoT technologies such as digital traceability in their internal supply chain at manufacturing sites in order to stay compatible with the industry 4.0 requirements. In this paper, the capabilities of suitable digital traceability technologies are screened together with the actual GPV needs to determine if deployment of such technologies would benefit GPV shop floor operations and can solve the issues they face due to a lack of traceability. The traceability term refers to tracking the geolocation of products throughout the manufacturing steps and how that functionality can foster further optimization of the manufacturing processes. The paper focuses on comparing different IoT technologies and analyze their positive and negative attributes to identify a suitable technological solution for product traceability in the metal manufacturing industry. Finally, the paper proposes a suitable implementation road map for GPV, which can also be adopted from other metal manufacturing industries to deploy industry 4.0 traceability at shop floor level.