An empirical study about the relationship between lean management and industry 4.0

Lean Management and its tools have been widely used for years. Lean Management aims at streamlining the flow of value while continually seeking to reduce the resources required to produce a given set of products. Although the adoption of Lean is not a new concept, few organizations fully understand the philosophy behind its practices and principles. The relationship between Industry 4.0 and Lean Management has been increasingly evidenced in operations management research. To create a better understanding, the main point of interest for this work is to investigate the link and integration between Industry 4.0 and Lean Management, as well as examine its implications on performance and the environmental factors influencing these relationships in some companies especially focusing on the mining industry. Based on the literature review, a questionnaire was created about Lean Management and Industry 4.0, which was applied in some companies in Brazil and Hungary, most of them from the mining industry. The aim of this paper is to evaluate the application of combining both methodologies, Lean Management and Industry 4.0. The unique contribution of the paper is to see the common areas of Lean and Industry 4.0 where there are research and knowledge, but the application level at the companies is low.