The Internet of Things (IoT) in Smart Industry : chance and challenge in industrial business relationships

Industry 4.0 is disrupting many businesses, changing not only the way companies work internally, but also externally. Relationship building between firms proved to become increasingly important since the start of the globalization, but industry 4.0, with its possibilities for connectivity, takes this even further. Based on established literature, a model is proposed, describing how internal technology changes influence the way companies collaborate with each other. By interviewing several leading firms in the area of automation and connectivity, optimizations to this model are proposed. The main factors in relationship building prove to be cooperation, commitment, trust, transparency, communication quality, information sharing, participation, joint problem solving, and conflict resolution techniques. This paper helps in evaluating those factors in the context of industry 4.0, while at the same time showing how they connect to internal changes caused by the digitization.