Industry 4.0 and its effect on processes and people becomes reality with all organizational and technological complex implications for the future. States around the world including Slovakia face the challenge of defining strategy on how to convert the challenges of Industry 4.0 into competitive advantage. This chapter focuses on Work 4.0 competences development, analyzed in the level of enrichment of the human capital content as well as in the level of labor market polarization. The aim of this chapter is to present opportunities and threats in competence development regarding the concept of Intelligent Industry and discuss sustainable solutions in the context of National Action Plan of Intelligent Industry of Slovak Republic, looking for win-win strategy. The authors analyze differences in competences achieved via education system in Slovakia and expectations of industry. Special attention is given the situation in Slovakia, country-oriented on automotive and with strong cooperation with Germany as innovation leader in European countries, to find strategy within this no zero game.
TopBackground
The innovative process of technological change, which is technologically based on the Internet, has formed the basis for Industry 4.0 concept as a new stage of the production process (Lukac, 2015). The concept of “Industry 4.0” was recognized in Germany to refer to the development of “cyber-physical systems” (CPS) and dynamic data processes that use massive amounts of data to drive smart machines (Strange & Zucchella, 2017).
The fourth industrial revolution, as a change within the entire value chain across the product life-cycle in company including a new level of digitalization, automatic data exchange and automation, demands a has significant paradigm shift in management of manufacturing and organization processes (Maslarić, Nikoličić, & Mirčetić, 2016; Saniuk & Saniuk, 2017; Schuh, Gartzen, Rodenhauser, & Marks, 2015; Wolf, Kleindienst, Ramsauer, Zierler, & Winter, n.d.). This cycle is geared to increasingly individualised customer wishes, and extends from the idea, the development and production work, and the delivery of a product to the final customer, to recycling, including the associated services. It is based on the availability of all relevant information in real-time as a result of networking all the parties involved in value creation, and on the ability to infer the optimal value stream from data at any time.