Autonomous Manufacturing-Related Procurement in the Era of Industry 4.0

The Fourth Industrial Revolution or Industry 4.0 will create intelligent manufacturing systems that consist of highly autonomous and self-controlled machines, equipment, and materials that communicate with each other not only within a company but also across companies in order to organize the value chain and produce the intended products in the best possible way with less or even no human interaction. In this context, procurement becomes an interesting issue that needs to be considered in detail in such manufacturing environments. This chapter analyzes the effect of those intelligent manufacturing systems on procurement processes by distinguishing between procurement tasks that will likely remain in human hands and those that will be taken over by these intelligent machines and systems. Especially for the latter scenario, a concept for an operational, fully-automated, and manufacturing-related procurement system is developed and presented here. For this, we begin by looking at the manufacturing-related procurement types in the era of Industry 4.0 that may be done by machines, followed by the discussion of innovation-based procurement practices that will require human input. We conclude by presenting the general concept of the autonomous manufacturing-based procurement system. Although the concept for the autonomous manufacturing-based procurement system is fully developed, further research is needed to connect this system to intelligent machines to enable a fully autonomous procurement especially to execute transactional relations and repetitive tasks.