A New Approach for the Evaluation of Internal Logistics Processes and Their Readiness for the Industry 4.0 Concept

The concept of Industry 4.0 is inflected in many areas with the introduction of automation, robotics, or modern storage systems with a key element of digitization. An important area for implementing the elements of Industry 4.0 is internal logistics because the supply of production lines and material storage are among the company's key processes. The complexity and irregularity of processes can be automated and changed into an autonomous form based on the concept. The article deals with internal logistics and describes new approaches to the evaluation of logistics processes based on the developed methodology. The methodology design is based on theoretical foundations, and therefore the main part of the article describes the main areas entering the new methodology. Internal logistics is structured into five main dimensions, which completely cover it. According to the company maturity, dimensions are divided into six levels, where the highest level corresponds to Industry 4.0 principles. The evaluation is based on maximizing the criterion function and point evaluation from structured interviews with company members. After partial results from each dimension, it is possible to evaluate the current company level in internal logistics, which is the primary goal. The methodology is therefore mainly of a diagnostic nature.