Industry 4.0 and Service Companies: The Case of the French Postal Service

The aim of this article is to overview the transition of smart logistic companies towards the Industry 4.0. Industry 4.0 is a generic concept that subscribes to the idea of a general awareness of the importance of new technologies for the manufacturing industry. This reflection aims to conserve and develop a strong and innovative industrial activity to support the modernization of different fields. In the case of high volumes service companies, many reasons have led to this modernization; remarkable increase in the volume of items to deliver, complexity of managing the transportation system and the personnel scheduling, humanization of work conditions, etc. In this work, The French postal service company, La Poste, is given as a particular case of study. La Poste daily treats high volumes of mail and parcel items. In this article, the organization of the French postal service system from the collect to the delivery is explicitly described. A literature review of different concerned research axes is presented. Finally, we present what we think are the future needs for researches in these axes.

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