Michael UngarCEO of the Industry 4.0 Club

Small Businesses and Industry 4.0: Start NOW! Avoid These Mistakes

1 May 2025 · 1 min

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In this brief dialogue, Speaker A highlights the common dilemma faced by small‑to‑mid‑sized companies: they recognize the need for Industry 4.0 digital transformation but are stuck on how to begin because day‑to‑day operational pressures dominate their focus. Speaker B counters the traditional Industry 3 approach of launching a large, product‑selection‑driven project and instead advises that these firms should start by adopting a SaaS‑centric business‑model mindset. The exchange serves as a concise, advisory piece aimed at helping SMEs break the inertia and initiate practical, scalable Industry 4.0 initiatives.

Chapters

I think one of the biggest challenges, at least that I see, especially for small to mid-sized companies, is just how do they start? You know, most of those folks are focused on today's challenges. And if they've got any kind of, they might even actually have a strategic plan for a couple of years from now that focuses on the market. But how do they start? Because it seems, you know, there's always something else that you have to deal with for the customer or an internal problem. What are you seeing and what would you say to those folks that they'd say to you, look, I'm ready to go, but I never seem to be able to get out of the starting gate?
Traditionally in the Industry 3 world, they would have put a project together. They'd have had to do a product selection process. They would have had to, and all of that, those steps to get to where you need to get to would have been. So where you start in my mind is not down that path. You start in the, in the, in the SaaS business model world.