Systems Research and Behavioral Science

The 49th Annual Meeting of the International Society for the Systems Sciences had, as its theme, ‘the potential impacts of systemics on society’. As my contribution to this, I want to discuss why I think a critical systems approach called ‘creative holism’ can help managers address complex problem situations. As is frequently stated, managers today face increasing complexity, change and diversity. Furthermore, the solutions they are offered to help them cope in this situation rarely seem to work. In this paper, it is argued that those solutions fail because they are not holistic or creative enough. The benefits to be gained from holism and creativity (in a systemic sense) are outlined, and a practical approach, ‘creative holism’, is specified which aims to better equip managers to deal with complex problem situations. If the argument is right then systemics has the potential to have both a significant and a beneficial impact upon society in the years to come. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The transformation from traditional manufacturing to intelligent manufacturing intrigues the profound and lasting effect on the future manufacturing worldwide. Industry 4.0 was proposed for advancing manufacturing to realize short product life cycles and extreme mass customization in a cost‐efficient way. As the heart of Industry 4.0, smart factory integrates physical technologies and cyber technologies and makes the involved technologies more complex and precise in order to improve performance, quality, controllability, management, and transparency of manufacturing processes. So far, leading manufacturers have begun the journey toward implementing smart factory. However, most firms still lack insight into the challenges and resources for implementing smart factory. As such, this paper identifies the requirements and key challenges, investigates available new technologies, reviews existing studies that have been done for smart factory, and further provides guidance for manufacturers to implementing smart factory in the context of Industry 4.0.