ABSTRACT
The technology has gone through major changes from first to fourth industrial revolution. The knowledge acquired during the first industrial revolution still supports major definition, e.g., that of a factory in fourth industrial revolution. SMEs akin to cottage industry of pre-first industrial revolution to startups in the fourth industrial revolution have major differences in technology readiness and management methodologies. Both SMEs and startups exist today, making major contributions to the economy of a country.
SMEs have been and startups today are operated by the lower middle-class or middle-class population of a country, providing stimulus to job creation and technical development and generating a significant sum of foreign exchange if operated in modern areas of technology.
These modern areas are defined today by Claus Schwab in his book The Fourth Industrial Revolution. Based on the idea of cyber physical systems, the pillars of Industry 4.0 and Industry 5.0 (also known as Smart Manufacturing) are defined.
Any legacy or new SME or startup should conform to using Industry 4.0 and Industry 5.0. The product or range of products, or services offered by SMEs or startups, may span from vendorship of an automobile giant to simple archives for any administrative office.
Digital Communication, whether cellular or physical, takes the central stage for information transfer between any two or multiple nodes. A complete section is devoted to this topic.
This chapter relates to Pakistan's SME policy and its implementation in sectoral-free SME or Startup so that Pakistan and other countries in N11 or D8 category can benefit from it using Smart Manufacturing.
It is to be noted that Smart Manufacturing based on Intelligent Manufacturing System (IMS) and Intelligent Manufacturing Implementation System (IMIS) are the only thriving businesses in today's recession-hit world and will be the way forward in the future as well.
