Industry 4.0 Is Dead
For more than a decade, Industry 4.0 has described a vision of connected manufacturing. Machines, people and business systems share information, allowing production to respond more intelligently. A machine stoppage can inform the production schedule. Quality results can help explain a process problem. Sales can offer delivery dates based on what the factory can actually produce.
There is evidence that this works. Respondents in Deloitte’s 2025 survey of 600 executives at large manufacturers with US headquarters or operations reported average production-output improvements
of 10–20% following smart-manufacturing initiatives.1 Connected manufacturing has practical value.