Cutting-edge technology is changing our society rapidly. Internationally, this drastic movement is known as “Industry 4.0.” Meanwhile, the Japanese government is advocating Society 5.0, which focuses on not only the industrial sector but also the social economy. The Realization of Society 5.0 is expected to increase Japanʼs competitiveness through solving social issues and shaping Japanʼs future and Japanese business welcomes this initiative. The key to this concept is utilizing data and we have many challenges to overcome to reap the fruits of Society 5.0.

Industrial engineering (IE) and lean production (LP) are important to the modern manufacturingindustry according to the experience of the USA, Germany, and Japan. This paper demonstrates the necessity of LP to facilitate manufacturing industry development in mainland China. Only via management innovation with LP localization can the manufacturing industry in mainland China be transformed or upgraded successfully.

The Industry 4.0 movement in Germany has attracted tremendous attention, with development of similar policies and programs all over the world. While Industry 4.0 is heralded as enshrining the technologies that will lead to the Fourth Industrial Revolution, the essence of the technologies and the challenges involved in industrial and societal leapfrogging are not clear or well understood. This paper presents the key technologies supporting Industry 4.0, emphasizing how their relationships and synergies facilitate innovation. We elaborate on how such technologies will fundamentally change our economy from a “push” to a “pull” alternative, as already suggested by evolutionary models such as shared economy and outcome economy variants.

This study explains the current state of “Manufacture Innovation 3.0”, Korean strategy for the 4thIndustrial Revolution which focuses on Smart Factory. Since 2014, it has achieved some amazing results, but, still needs to be improved to reflect the real SMEsʼ business environment. Hence, this study suggests the “Globalization 4.0 Initiative” as the new policy imperative of Korean government which induces Korean SMEs to participate in the 4th Industrial Revolution trends in global context.

In view of its vital importance for building lasting competitive advantage and long-term success for firms, sustainable operations have aroused extensive interest in academia and industry. Drawing on a real-world case, the purpose of this study is to explore transformation of sustainable operations in Chinese enterprises. The case study also systematically investigated the logic behind processes and mechanisms of Lean-and-Green enabled sustainability vis-a-vis firms in developing countries. The research reveals that the key strongpoint of Lean-and-Green enabled sustainability for firms in developing economies is the well-configured model of Green Embedded Lean Deployment System (GELDS). It has addressed the theoretical gap of achieving enterprise sustainability driven by Lean and Green implementations in developing economies. The proposed GELDS model is driven by the strategy operations manipulations fit and a variety of novel concepts, thoughts, and tools. In conclusion, this research provides considerable reference value for enterprises in developing countries to attain sustainable operations and durable competitive advantage.

The “Made in Vietnam” lean management philosophy has been widely accepted in Vietnameseenterprises since their first appearance in 2013. The “Made in Vietnam” lean approach has been successful because of its high effectiveness in utilizing employees’ intellectual abilities to minimize both tangible and intangible waste costs and avoid non-value-creating process steps. Today, the term “Industry 4.0” is used to describe a vision of future production systems that will be driven by modern information and communication technologies. This allows creating high flexibilities in production volume and customization, extensive integration between customers, suppliers and manufactures, and, above all, sustainability. This study investigates how to integrate Industry 4.0 technologies into Made in Vietnam lean management model and assess the effectiveness of the new Made in Vietnam lean management model in the Industrial 4.0 environment in Vietnamese manufacturing enterprises through two case studies. Hence, the study shows how Industry 4.0 can add value to Made in Vietnam lean management model in the future.

The term, “Industry 4.0,” introduced by the German government, evokes a new era or the so-called 4th Industrial Revolution. In order to catch up with the worldʼs industrial development trends, various countries have launched corresponding strategies to define their own meanings and terms for this fourth industrial revolution. Therefore, by comparing the major “Industry 4.0” strategies of Germany, China, and the United States, the present paper explores the effectiveness of a new lean operation model for Chinese manufacturing enterprises.

Each panelist briefly introduces the initiative, the status quo, and the perspective on Industry 4.0 in their homeland. The panelists represent Made in China 2025 in mainland China, Productivity 4.0 in Taiwan, Manufacturing Innovation 3.0 Initiative in South Korea, Industry 4.0 in Vietnam, and Society 5.0 in Japan and summarize these initiatives. Then, the panelists and participants have discussions on the matters.

Currently, a large amount of news and articles related to Internet of Things (IoT) are circulatingworldwide along with information about Industry 4.0-related technical developments. In 2011, the German government even adopted “Industrie 4.0/industry 4.0” as their national strategy to improve their global competitiveness. This study compares data from four countries: United States, Germany, China, and Japan. I perform clustering by the weight of group after extracting IoT-related keywords that have appeared in newspapers. It was seen that the United States focuses on the Internet/data processing technologies, and Germany focuses on the production/M2M (Machine to Machine) technologies. However, Japan and China lacked such focus.

We propose a stochastic model based on a nonhomogeneous Poisson process (NHPP) for predicting the number of failures. The new NHPP-based stochastic model uses an intensity function consisting of trend and periodic parts. This allows us to precisely predict failures in gas systems in Japan because of the flexibility of the NHPP and specific characters of our proposed intensity function. We show the proposed model well predicts the number of failures in a term in comparison with two prominent stochastic models and in terms of prediction error.