From legacy-based factories to smart factories level 2 according to the industry 4.0

The fourth industrial revolution is mainly based on the Industrial Internet-of-Things (IoT), connectivity and cyber-physical systems, in which factories should reach important theoretical savings. In this paper, a transition procedure is proposed to transform a factory based on a ‘Make to Order’ (MTO) manufacturing process (comprised mainly of legacy machinery) into a smart factory level 2 (according to the Industry 4.0) fully aligned to its organisational strategic goals that allows to reach the theoretical savings but without the prohibitive cost of replacing legacy-based machinery by new one. This proposal was validated in a real case study during four months where operation efficiency was improved and the energy consumption, the projected costs and the percentage of human errors were reduced in 17%, 3% and 70%, respectively.