Promoting Smart Industry with a Smart Monodzukuri Support Team in Thailand: A Case Study

This work aimed to promote improvement of manufacturing through adopting smart manufacturing in Thailand. As the manufacturing industry in Thailand moves toward Industry 4.0, many SMEs are struggling to start up and invest. To help them, the Thai and Japanese governments are collaborating to provide a Smart Monodzukuri support team to assist SMEs to have more skills and be more competitive. This team will learn techniques to implement Japan's Industrial Value Chain Initiative (IVI), an organization that uses cyber-physical manufacturing, and encourages all companies to take part in a “small start” initiative. This work provides a case study using an auto parts manufacturing company. We describe how a Smart Monodzukuri team could collaborate with this company's staff following the IVI guidelines. The results show that by using the IVI idea, the team could incorporate cyber-physical manufacturing with few difficulties and low investment. This is the first simple and feasible step toward Industry 4.0 for SMEs.